We spent a lot of time in this room, resting between forays extending to the various wings of the exhibition. The sound was well-balanced, with not too much detail, not too much bass, not too loud, fairly evenly distributed from top to bottom frequency-wise.

In some sense, the overall balance here wasn't a surprise. Besides the Brinkmann* LaGrange turntable (with the new, longer 12 inch tonearm - no I did not personally notice a difference in sound but this was in an unfamiliar system and we had not heard the LaGrange before either) and the HRS rack, there was nothing in this system that was obviously 'state of the art'.

From the about $17K speakers, the Hovland (I think) cable, the reasonably-priced Brinkmann electronics and the very neutral digital transport and DAC, everything was at least competent, if not excellent.

And I guess that is how I would describe the sound. It was playing the Kind of Blue LP (after playing Stairway to Heaven on vinyl - thanks Lawrence :-) which I am very familiar with (and who isn't), that I really noticed the lack of harmonic structure, richness and natural bloom.

Yep - 'Stick a tube in it' (the system) comes to mind.

In general, though , this was the theme of the good rooms at the show. A distinct lack of the ability to communicate emotion and harmonic richness. The rooms with the warmer speakers, with the better solid-state amplifiers, did better than those without.

There was also a noticeable lack of PRaT (pacing, rhythm, and timing also known as the ability to force the listener into tapping their toes to the beat, whether they want to or not) at the show.

Funny, 'sticking a tube in it' did not work for many systems here - as the few systems with even a touch of emotionalfullness were the Kharma, Peak Consult and Sonus Faber systems - all but the Peak Consult were fully solid-state.

Overall, this was one of the best sounding rooms at the show.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

This room had a very enjoyable sound. Being in here quite a few times to photograph the very photogenic Sonus Faber Memento, Stradivarius and Amati speakers - the music was always pleasant and musical.

The Ayre amplifiers seem to drive the speakers quite well. Although not being the last word in resolution and transparency, they had a good amount of detail did not impart any solid-state signature to the sound that I could hear on these speakers.

As usual with Sonus Faber, the sound was a tad on the warm side and a little rounded - but in a nice way. And the bass, as is also as usual with the Amati speakers, was a little dull, laid back, and lacked much detail or depth.

But if the Prime Directive of system design is to build something that is at least a joy to listen to, and I think it is, then this system was a resounding success.

And if some other, higher numbered, lower priority, directive is to make the system pleasant to look at - and looking at their systems is by all accounts one of the things audiophiles do a lot when they listen to a two channel video-less system - then starting with these speakers adds another great big checkmark.

Although this room had a tuner hooked up to the system - I am not sure if they played it. At least, while I was there anyway, not hearing any 'commercial breaks'.

Overall, this was one of the best sounding rooms at the show.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

This room also had a very enjoyable sound.

The new Kharma* Ceramique CE 3.1c speakers are the baby brothers of Kharma's world famous Ceramique 3.2 speakers. They appear to be only slightly smaller, but come it at just a little over half the price. How do they compare? Are they an acceptable substitute for those that cannot lay out the $22K or so for the 3.2 speakers?

We also heard this exact same system, or something very, very close to it, at CES 2006, and in a similarly sized room, but with the Kharma Mini Exquisites - their top of the line 2-way speakers. So we have some slight familiarity with how the other components in this system sound.

The little 3.1 sounds  a lot like its bigger brother, the 3.2. Same great sound-staging, imaging and dynamics. Same tonal purity, although perhaps a little leaner - I often wanted a tube in the system somewhere to flesh out the harmonics and bloom a little (let's see, I also thought this would help in the Brinkmann room, the Sonus Faber room, ...no I am not going tube happy, I promise :-).

The 3.1 also seemed more.... personal... and intimate.

This intimacy provides a greater sense of presence and... touchability. Not so much solidity as palpability. Hard to describe, it is like the music is speaking to me, and only to me, personally. This is opposed to the more common (well  not that common, but what the best larger speakers offer) 'you are there' effect where the listener is a member of the audience and must make contact with the musicians in the metaverse somewhere, as opposed to right here.

Told you it was hard to describe.

Overall, this was one of the best sounding rooms at the show.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

There was some interest by many people at the show in this room as this was the first time the Verity Audio statement speakers, the Lohengrin, had been exhibited at a show (AFAIK).  They also had a large room and a top-class expensive setup with a WAVAC amplifier, dCS stack for the digital front end, and Nagra doing preamplification duties.

Well.....

For one, people who think the WAVACs are 'tubey' sounding, well, we disagree. This is one of the more neutral sounding amps out there, including both solid-state and tube-based amplifiers. There are solid-state amps that are warmer than these amps.

Second, the tell-tale midrange 'super pump' dynamic of the WAVACs, especially detectable on piano notes, is still alive and happy. At first I thought this was the best, most realistic piano reproduction I had heard when I heard it on the ESP speakers at CES 2004. But now I am not so sure.

The rest of the frequencies... seemed a little compressed. The bass especially - which also hugged the speakers some. But even the lower midrange seemed cutoff and clipped.

There was also a lack of emotion, a lack of PRaT, coherency, sound-staging, ...a lack of enjoyability, actually.

Although probably held up to a higher standard than some of the other rooms because of its cost and size, this room still failed to provide the most basic needs of this audiophile.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

We heard this room a number of times, trying to 'figure it out'. Regular readers of our reports know that we really liked the Cogent horns that we heard setup in Las Vegas at CES 2006. We really, really liked them.

This system did not sound like that system. There was some of the same tonal purity, yes, and some of the same macro-dynamics. But the midi-dynamics and micro-dynamics were compressed and even clipped-off here. The notes did not follow through, did not decay correctly, and therefore sounded unnatural - much like the Avantgarde horn speakers - to the point of unrecognizability.

Well, it wasn't that bad, but it did strain the recognition part of this listener's old brain when it tried to map sounds heard to original musical instruments played, even on percussion which is usually a fairly easy exercise,. And so it all in all did not sound real in this room.

It wasn't harmonically rich enough, or PRaT'ly enough, or anything else enough to put it over the bar to make it enjoyable. As a pure 'impressive' system it did succeed - but I think they were probably going for more than this.

The combination of small room and new speakers and who knows what else caused this room to be disappointing.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

This room had one of the most impressive layouts of any room at a show we have ever seen. The Montreal show had much more stuff on static display than other shows - and this room just blew out the doors.

Unfortunately, even though they had other amplifiers and other speakers on standby (like the Rockports), they apparently decided to stick with just the big VTL amps driving the Avalon Eidolon Diamond (at least we think it is the Diamond, it is not as if we personally can tell the Eidolon from the Eidolon Diamond from the Eidolon Vision just by looking at them).

OK, people will think I hate the VTL amps (I wonder why?) but these amps apparently do not have the ability to do micro-dynamics or micro anything as far as I can tell, having heard them over and over on some of the most resolving speakers known to peoplekind (for example the Wilson MAXX).

What does this mean for the listener? It means everything has a hard sound - having no delicacy nor subtle shades of harmonic or dynamic information. The perhaps dozens of shades of a typical note are compressed into one 'bleep', and when the human ear cannot resolve a note into its several shades - the overall effect is a single note at a single frequency, at a single volume, the particular frequency therefore lasting longer, sounding less realistic and more unnatural, and not blending with other notes in its vicinity very well. It just sounds much more like noise.

The VTL seems to be designed for systems that are designed to be impressive and nothing else. In this they succeed.

People who read our reports and the Audiophile's Guide to the Galaxy know that we think Avalon makes some of the very best speakers out there. Above all, despite any shortcomings that they may or may not have, they are almost always quite musical and enjoyable  to listen to.

But not here, unfortunately.

In this room, they played the sound very, very, very loud.

The Mixibitors hopefully got a chance to play with this room. At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

This room was using a Redpoint turntable that was not red. It was silver. Well, brushed aluminum or something. It wasn't red.

The sound was quite dynamic at all levels and had good separation and texture and body. I think it was missing some amounts of subtle information that prohibited it from being very coherent, for me anyway. There was also a lack of emotive character and continuousness.

The lack of coherency  and continuousness seemed to result in each note sounding like it was in its own space as opposed to sharing the space with the rest of the music. Each note sounding nice and beautiful, but detached. This effect, now that I am describing it, is quite common I think to many systems we have heard over the years.

That said, it was one of the better sounds at the show and Neli mentioned several times that she liked it quite a bit.

We heard these speakers at RMAF and CES and hope to hear them again. These are speakers that look solid, and heavy. And they are. Wait, they, the Prince, are not so bad, coming in at 230 lbs with crate. The Hansen sound is big and open, with good separation and timbre, much like the Acapella and Dunlavy house sounds.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

Fidelio makes audiophile recordings and they setup a room at the Montreal show each year to show off and sell their CDs.

We bought the show CD, shown above, and a couple of others of theirs and have played them here this week during extensive cable auditions on a  very resolving system. Extremely well recorded.

This system was very well designed, the sound being very balanced top to bottom, in terms of harmonics, dynamics and overall character. It just shows you can hear it when someone takes the care to build a system, carefully balancing each part so that it works well with the others.

This is opposed to most systems at most shows which are thrown together, never heard before and never again to be heard after their show. Sometimes I wonder why they even bother showing up - but I guess it is a testimony to the overall quality of the components that something listenable usually does get built.

The Parsifal speakers in this room sounded as good as I have ever heard these speakers sound - or any Verity speakers for that matter. If you must have these speakers in your system, and you have a room about this size, you will probably be doing yourself a big favor to try and replicate this system in your listening room - perhaps switching out the Nagra solid-state amp for their tube amp, which is what I heard Fidelio did last year. And perhaps using your CD player of choice - but maybe that is just me.

There was of course limitations in resolution and harmonic depth and top to bottom coherence. But overall, this was one of the better sounds at the show.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

This was another impressive room visually, the walls decked out in black cloth, and almost all of the Simaudio stuff must have been on display.

Sonically. Well Neli hated it. During the time I was in there they were only playing gentle new age music which did not sound too bad to me (yes, some systems can even have a hard time with this kind of music - so this system was at least better than those).

Otherwise, not much to say - as I didn't really get a good listen in this room.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.

mmm. mmm. mmm. Now this was interesting.

First we have Berning's very, interesting, looking preamplifier. Took us a while to figure out it even was a preamplifier. Now, there are some different-looking preamps out there, so this is not the first time we were slow on the uptake. But... well, look at it!

The plastic bubble thing at the left there on top of one of the coils is the left-channel volume control, as I understand it. No, as Neli was relieved to find out, this is not the way their final product will look. I guess this kind of design is a thing only a male would like the look of  (and I do!).

Second, the room used these speakers which, for all their expense and apparent recent popularity, we think sound very closed in and uneven, at least dynamically. But lo and behold they actually sounded OK in this room.

The sound overall was quite nice and allowed a good deal of the Meitner digital's purity of tone and dynamic truthfulness to come through.

So, surprise, surprise (after these Peak Consult Empress speakers made problems for at least two good sounding systems at CES 2006 - a Continuum-based system and the Zanden system, all IMHO of course), we think this was one of the best sounding rooms at this year's Montreal show.

At least, that is how it sounded to these ears.