After spending this show across the hall from the D’Agostino room (Krell++ on Wilson) and listening to a steady thumb Thump THUMP for a few days, I think we’ve come up with another way to organize show rooms:

They should put all the rooms that will play opera near each other (all one or two of us). And all those that will play techno (again all one or two rooms). All those that will play Diana Krall and Patricia Barber together (a lot of these). And a few rooms will be in the classical section.

And a few rare rooms in the ‘we will play anything’ category.

And so on…

And, finally to put all the ‘thumpers’ together. 😉

The White Room (Hegel)

White and more white, even on the floor.

Kind of a sensory deprivation room – it affected me in several ways:

1. Forced me to focus more on the sound, as my eyeballs had much less to do than normal.

2. Disoriented me, in that there was much less information telling my woefully tired brain which way was up (i.e. horizon information) – so I was a little more wobbly on my feet and had to think more about which way was straight down (paying more attention to gravity)

It was just really weird, man 🙂 We’ve all probably been in near pitch black rooms and listened to music. Or just closed our eyes. This was like that but with the eyes wide open.

This made me think of how I would rank all the things I could be looking at while I listen to music [which would actually add to – not distract from – the enjoyment of the music]

My Favorite Front Wall Views

1. The Ocean with various islands in the distance [i.e. Hawaii at about a 100+ foot elevation]
2. Waves breaking over rocks/onto a beach
3. Our current trees and cityscape view
4. Nature
5. 100% whiteness

Yeah, so I liked this room’s setting a lot.

When we think of where to move, I fantasize about the places that combine the 1st three views into one 😉

What I think I prefer least is (just my opinion):

* A painting (I just get tired of string at the same thing all the time. I have thought and thought about this as I have gone to art galleries for decades. Side walls of the room is fine)

* LPs (I love looking at LPs – but I like them on the sides of the room, looking directly at them reminds me of other music I could be listening to instead)

* A stupid tiny little window (sorry, but I have lived in too many basements with too many stupid tiny dirty spidery windows)

* Rock posters (makes the most sense, perhaps, but the reading part of the brain would read them over and over…)

What I do not know if I would really like or not:

* A giant aquarium (in college I used to stare into an aquarium and play LPs – or rather visa-versa :-))

* A giant fire (in a fire place, silly :-))

* Various seamless natural wood or polished stone walls (don’t know if my pattern-finding part of the brain would not be able to stop finding patterns in the wood/stone, detracting from finding patterns in the music)

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Oh, and the sound in this room was typical Hegel: more tuneful than average, and with average amounts of dynamics and resolution and continuousness etc, for their price range.

There is no spoon… I mean… Best of Show.

The Best of Show, if there were to be a best of show this year, was the music vendor room. That carnal lust for more music – that almost irresistible gravitational field sucking me in, making me start leafing through albums was only resisted by walking very quickly past the booths without looking close enough to see the objects of my desire . It was the room where, if we had any room here at all for more LPs, I would have done some real serious damage to the wallet.

Otherwise, there wasn’t really anything I thought really kicked butt, although there were several interesting things that I think made the show very worthwhile for me, anyway, and maybe some of you will think they are pretty cool too. I’ll talk about them in the next few posts.

Traffic/attendance was – experientially – about 10-20% down from last year [although having the new d’Agostino (Krell-founder) amp playing subwoofer rich music extremely loud with the door open a lot probably scared away a lot of people. Sometimes you get good neighbors at these shows – and sometimes not.

Exhibitors seemed more stressed out, attendees seemed more relaxed this show compared with last year.

A LOT of systems were downsized this year – Magico, Evolution Acoustics, Audio Limits, IsoMike, etc. and put even more distance between the state-of-the-art and the average system at this show [not being known for debuting state-of-the-art systems in the first place].

What really set this show apart from the previous years, I think, was that a lot of CES-only diehards finally broke down and attended / exhibited at this show this year [you all know who you are :-)].

Well, that’s ’bout it. Not much to say this year. [yes, we are DEFINITELY looking to spend our efforts on other, up-and-coming shows (Dagogo, Newport, Toronto) next year. ]

On to the more interesting rooms…