Yesterday I took the elevator up to the 11th floor in the tower and visited and took photos of all the rooms except our wonderful old room 9030 [too… let’s just say depressing], the old jtinn room [long boring story], and the VTL room [they do not want me photographing their room] on floors 11,10,9,8, 2 and 1. Used the stairs on the way down, of course 🙂 [see previous post a few days ago]. Neli did floors 4 and 5 over at the atrium.

Today we immediately walked over to the 3 rooms in the Hyatt. The rooms had a little bit more of an upscale vibe over there, but spent most of our time at the Wilson Alexandria XLF demo. Then back we walked and after a little farting [for like an hour?] around I visited and photographed all the room on floors 4 and 5 over at the atrium and most of the Mezzanine – and this time it was Neli who searched the tower for good music and good sound.

Whereas yesterday there were two rooms I kind of enjoyed:

The EMM Labs / Sony / IsoMike room
The Magico S1 / Krell room [I Knoooow!?]

Today I enjoyed a few more:

The NVS [modified YG Acoustics, McCormack] room
The PranaFidelity room
The Zu Speakers, Peachtree room

Taking price into account [of course] I thought these rooms had high performance/price ratios.

The theme this year for me was reasonably good sounding solid-state. How weird is that? 🙂

As Thom Mackris (Galibier turntables) sagely mentioned, almost anybody can make a decent sounding tube amp. But it takes real effort and skill to make a decent sounding solid-state amp.

Traffic at this show i.e. the number of audiophiles attended seems to me to be quite a bit less than last year [my guess is half, though most people I talked to were more cautious about the number], but of a higher quality / more interested in actually listening to things as opposed to quickly surfing rooms.

Wilson Alexandria XLF speakers with a pair of their Thor’s Hammer subwoofers on VTL, dCS, and Transparent over at the Hyatt.

Endeavor Audio Engineering, YFS, CL Audio with Dean Peer as guest in room 545.

I like the all black look. There is something to be said for the gear always looking its best.

Scaena speakers on ARC amplifier over at the Hyatt. Just a cool photo.

Live music sponsored by Ray Kimber.

High Water Sound brought a pair of large Cessaro horn speakers and put them in room 589. There were several horn speakers at the show this year.

Sadurni speakers in room 538

The Sadurni speakers have a built in flea watt 300B amplifier.

SW Speakers in room 453.

Much thanks go out to Albert Porter for loaning me a memory card after I somehow in a characteristic display of raw and fearsome intelligence forgot to bring mine to the show.

We’ll put the whole show up on Ultimist. But for now, some highlights.

Room 9002 – The Ayre Room. The Ayre guys setup a full-immersion record store time-warp in their room, called it Charlie’s Records, and transported a demonstration hi-fi system right into the middle of it. This is a real store [although LPs are from Boulder’s own ‘Absolute Vinyl Records & Stereo ‘] and there are lots of nice used vinyl here folks.

Vaughn Speakers. Room 9007. Plasma tweeter.

Dail speakers with U.S. flag. Room 8020.

FIM CDs for sale in the First Impression Music room in 2004

More tomorrow morning… OK. It is morning… and here’s more.

A 3-conductor cable weaver in one of the IsoMike / Kimber rooms.

A closeup of the cable being weaved and the 3 spools of conductor. Looks like there is room for 5(?) conductors on this weaver.

The Kimber Kable mascot [I think that is what it is. I forgot what Ray Kimber called it. Doh!]

A prototype 1500 watt 220V amplifier from EmmLabs. Effortlessness. Surprisingly truly significantly different from the big Pass Labs amps of years past on these Sony speakers. In the big IsoMike room.

The crane used by EmmLabs to lift the 400 lb amps out of their crates. We want one. My arms and back feel better just looking at it. 🙂

Acoustic Sounds in the Bluebell room [far side of the first floor] was playing good music.

The Audio Note U.K. room number 566 was showing an older version of their smaller ‘K’ speakers [$3000-ish]. We all listened to some reel-to-reel fabulousness at the end of the day. The Beatles, for me, was exceptional [way better than the commercial releases, though I have not heard the latest re-mastered re-released re-pressings].

Stairways.

Stairways are often the quick way to get around at shows [the Flamingo / THE Show at CES being an exception].

Yeah, you will most likely arrive breathing heavily and with leaden legs when ascending floors – but this can often be more pleasant than shifting from leg to leg staring at the psychedelic carpet waiting for elevators for longer than around 5 minutes [YMMV if you have more or less patience than I. Neli almost always prefers the stairs – seizing an opportunity to burn off more calories and get more fit. Ugh. :-)]

I looked for a good map of the Marriott 1st floor layout – to no avail [though I did find out that the Great American Beer Festival is happening at the same time as RMAF this year in Denver].

So… until I find such a map: we will just have to muddle along.

The low-hanging fruit is to always take one of the two stairways when journeying between the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th floors in the Tower area of the show and the 4th and 5th floors in the Atrium part of the show.

Now for the not-so low hanging fruit. 🙂

One can traverse the stairways between the 2nd and 8th floors. It is somewhat easier going down than up.

And one of those stairways ends up down on the ground floor taking you OUTSIDE, to the right of the main entrance and to the left of the North side entrance. This door is usually open, and people who grow impatient waiting for the main Tower elevators to return from their sojourn to Tibet could, if they would be so bold, to go out the exterior doors to the left of the elevator bank, hang a right, walk about 40 feet and through a metal exterior door and take the stairs up to 2nd, or, for the not faint of heart, the 8th.

The stairways for the Atrium side of the show also go down to the ground floor – but exterior doors are typically locked [a change they made 3 or 5 years ago]. This means that you really can’t use these stairs to go up from the ground floor to the 4th or 5th floors.

And when descending the Atrium stairs down to the ground floor, you will either find yourself outside in a hurry [and, BTW, it does rain and snow in Denver. You will need something to protect your camera and / or self] or you will find yourself in an airlock next to Audio Limits’ room and have to frantically wave at people through the locked glass doors to get them to let you back into the building [have done this many times. However, it really works much better during show hours when there are people around. Otherwise you have to exit through the exterior door and take a long walk around the hotel back to the main front entrance].

Well, those are my tips and tricks.

Perhaps somebody has some others they might want to share.

Oh, and there are also the freight elevators, which break a lot less frequently than the guest elevators for some reason – but we do not use them when we are, you know, gearless – otherwise it seems kind of rude to those that are, you know, gearfull.