Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

For those that can’t wait, we are steadily putting up the pictures now – but there is no commentary to speak of and the photos are in a very high-resolution format. These pages will take some time to load. Some pictures may be removed, some added as the report evolves.

After most of the pictures are up we will then add commentary.

Finally we will make a average resolution format version (like the CES 2006 show report) and a low resolution version. We might make these lower res versions earlier if I get a chance to automate the process a little bit better than what Photoshop offers.

Many thanks to Dave Clark at Positive Feedback for pointing out the Photoshop batch processing feature. Just wish the feature worked better….but that’s photoshop for you.

Oh, the high-res report starts here.

Please, everyone, show goers as well as exhibitors, you are welcome to submit your room equipment details and whatever other comments along with the Photo ID number of the picture the comments are associated with. Either post it to the blog or email us directly. Some exhbitors have helped us out with equipment details in previous reports and we are happy to post equipment lists. Commentary in the past has only been Neli’s and mine… but we are willing to try something new (other people’s comments will be clearly marked).

To determine a photo ID number right click on the picture(s) of the room’s picture in Internet Explorer and select Properties from the menu. The photo ID number is the “IMG_xxxx” number at the end of the Adress (URL).

Our show reports focus on sound and pictures. The names of equipment and their prices is of lessor priority to us (we consider it to be more or less brochureware) – but many of our guests do enjoy that stuff too.

Thanks,
Mike.

“The Music’s over. Turn out the lights.”

The truth is even more bizarre than just ‘lights out’.

We woke up this morning, packed up, and left Montreal for home. As we left, we glanced into the rooms and hallways that for the last 3 days contained Brinkmanns and Kharmas and ELACs and 100s of avid audiophiles – playing all kinds of wonderful music – now sitting stark quiet, empty, and with beds and dressers looking for all intents and purposes like empty hallways and ordinary hotel rooms. Shoulda taken a photo just to show you all just how weird and dead things looked – but we were packed and it was time to ‘vacate the premises’.

The show report should be done in a few days, …we hope. We took 2400 photos (13 CDROMs worth), about the same as for CES 2006, but this show was, I *guestimate*, only about 1/3 the size of CES. So hopefully we will be able to go into more depth on a room by room basis.

We’ll see.,,,

Yesterday I used the 50mm f1.4 lens for shooting for most of the day. It is a pain to have to stand accorss the room to take pictures with the thing – but when a picture is taken with it, correctly I mean, it is amazingly sharp and just stands out of the monitor like it was ‘real’ or something.

A good number of those 50mm pictures were a little too dark – I am still learning to use that lens (well, the camera too. I really am an avid audiophile with the desire to take pictures of what I think is really cool and beautful – but little skill at this point). But some look pretty good…

Spent too much time at diner at the La Baguette D’ivoire ‘Fine Asian Cuisine’ about 5 blocks from the hotel. Very good mix of Thai and Vietnamese and Chinese. Yummy. No website, (514) 932-7099.

Got back at midnight and had time to process and put up only a few new pictures on Day Two’s dailies. Try to put some more up now….

It was much busier here yesterday. By 11:00 am you had to wait to get into most (90%)rooms, waiting until the next swell of pople left and you can swqueez in,to slowly move your way to the top as more people left.

For the impatient this doesn’t work very well. You really have to pick and chose a room(s) you want to hear and ‘stake them out’ – spending the time to nab that center seat in the sweet spot.

The sound of most rooms has settle down to what it is going to be (except for the rooms where they plan on switching speakers – for examle I was tld that one of the larger rooms will switch the Rockports in for the Avalon Eidolon Viision speakers).

THAT room, …had difficulties, apparently trying to make Avaon sound ‘Impressive’ b rnning them with a BIG VTL amp, and amp whch IMHO has no purpose but to put out large amounts of power, incapable of handliing microdynamics, or more than a few notes at a time for that matter – so the overall effect is one of a ‘compressed and muddled shouting of music’. These people carry excellent product lines – wish they had used a different amp here. These are great speakers – and I guess it is good to know just how bad they CAN sound.

The BIG all McIntosh room, with the lovely big amps and towering linearray speakers, also had difficulties. Tonality is way off here and over there, dynamics are uneven, most notes are starting early or late, and ending in simlar dissarry. Sounded MUUUUCH better in LAs Vegas on the big Dali Megalie speakers.

The other two big rooms downstairs we dissagree on. Neli is more forgivving of he faults of the Jadis-driven Pierre Gabrial speakers room, and I of the Sim Audio Moon-driven Dynaudio room. So more later on this maritial disagreement we we return to iron out this discrepency in good judgement on her part… 🙂

Got to hear and take pictures of most of the rooms today. I think we missed about two rooms per floor – mostly because they were too crowded to get into right then. Quite heavy traffic for the first day, seems to me.

The day started at 10:00 am and finished at 9:00pm, but we were pooped at 7:00pm and decided to go eat. Tonight we walked over (no huffing this time, it was only 3 blocks) to Cuisine Indienne. If you like Indian food, this is an excellent restaurant – we have had Indian food at literally 100s of places across the country. Not spicey, unfortunately, but very good.

The sound today was pretty good, but most systems were still just warming up. My expectation now is that there will be a number of ‘good’ sounding systems, but nothing ground breaking or magical.

Key points from the first day’s ‘dailies’: It sounds like the Fidelio people really know how to set up a great show system. The Berning amps can really drive difficult speakers. Little Cabasse speakers seem to be quite good. The Vivid Audio speakers are yet another speaker to join (well, join is not the right word, but it is late) the ranks of speakers that have very, very little box coloration that I can hear.

Sleep. Uh… After the city police and fireengine sirens calm down yet again….Sleep

Make that an hour and 15 minutes. Still have to go down and get our baaaAAAAaaadges.

We hear that ths s the first year that this show is headquartered in the Le Centre Sheraton here in Montreal. It was in the 40s last night, though breezy, as we huffed it to China Town for an… OK… dinner – next time we hopeflly won’t be so hungry that we go into almost the first place we find.

On our walk back we got to wade through a number of hockey fans leaving last night’s game. Maybe Canadians are just more polite than us Yanks, or maybe the $250+ price tags for tickets leaves no money for the consumption of alchohol, or maybe they won the game, but everybody seemed in a very nice mood.

They put us on floor 8, where quite a lot of the exhibits are. Cool! During the night we could hear first one system start up and then another. Seems like once a system is up and functioning, they want to ‘blow out the exhast pipes’ so to speak, and see what the SPL boundries are. [Our room at RMAF is so large, I think the SPLs to ‘blow out the exhaust pipes’ of our system there are way above the SPL limits the Denver Mariot hotel sets. But hey, this is the big city, real estate, and large rooms, is expensive here!]

Which gets me to the next point, these rooms are pretty small. If they are anything like our hotel room, most of them will be about 12 feet by 15 feet plus the entry way. The walls are pretty thick, though, as none kept us up all night with their rock and/or roll… 🙂

If all goes as planned we should be heading up North early tomorrow.

We will upload pictures daily, again if all goes as planned – can never tell about these things – lined off of the Montreal 20006, oops, getting ahead of ourselves here, Montreal FSI Festival Son & Image 2006 show report.

This will be our first time at FSI, in Montreal and in Canada. It is supposed to be up in the 30s during the day, temperature wise, but I hope we can get out of the hotel anyway :-}. We like to check out the city, circumnavigating a mile or two around the show hotels a good bit. In NYC we got to Times Square, Central Park, and the Upper East side.

During the show I will be trying to get to every room (hopefully twice as I want to use two different lenses) taking pictures. The show only lasts three days – so …wish me luck. On the final day, Sunday, we will be listening closely.

While I am taking pictures, Neli will be chatting up, and getting chatted up by, show goers and exhbitors alike, finding out what is new and wonderful in the land of Hi-Fi Audio, Northern-style.

After we get back, we should be putting up the full report after a few days of sleepless nights.

The ‘dailies’ will be in the standard resolution format, usually 1000 pixels wide.

As for the final report’s layout and format, we have plans to automatically make a low-bandwidth version for people still on dial-up, a standard bandwidth version (like the CES 2006 show report but better organized, not day by day this time) and an ultra-high(! whoo hoo!) resolution version.