Audio Federation - FSI 2006 - Festival Son & Image 2006

SHOW REPORT
Festival Son & Image
The Montreal High-end Audio Show
March 24th-26th, 2006

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The show this year was held for the first time in the Le Centre Sheraton hotel in Montreal in what appeared to be a mixed business / shopping district.

Walking two blocks over one finds a hustle and bustling crowd calmly shopping and / or heading to / from lunch or hockey games. The area was very much a mix; beautiful old architecture and churches nestled among sky scrapers and both chain and independently operated shops mixed with discretely nestled peep shows (sorry, no pictures ;-).

The front of the hotel. You know, where all the smokers hang out. This guy did make it across the traffic intact. Perhaps he was just one of the many people we saw who were in the country training for the Olympics.

Approximately half of the rooms were setup by Canadians and half by Americans. 99% of the Canadians seem to speak both French and English. Lucky for us, since we are still struggling with just English (though Neli reads French fairly well).

There were exhibitions below the main level, nicely accessible by stairs by those in a hurry. These floors, and floor number 4, contained the largest rooms.

Escalators went up all the way to the 4th floor. See, this is important, because the elevators were useless during the busy times - and a poor tired audiophile wanting to get back up to the rooms in the tower was going to have to use the fire stairs. But letting the escalators do the work up to the 4th floor, then walking up from the 4th floor to the 7th wasn't really too terrible. Better than walking all the way up from the first floor in my tired feet's humble yet very vocal opinion.

Here on the 3rd floor there isn't much but the registration booths. The inset picture shows the 3-day, full-conference attendee's 'badge'. Single-day badges were a different color. Cool huh?

Here we are on the 4th floor atrium. Bang & Olufsen were demoing the bass capability of their speakers. Prodigious bass, and fairly well controlled. Well beyond something you would find in circuit city. Impressive but not much detail in that bass though. Not much at all. The midrange was very... messed up. Perhaps they are positioning their line as something for people to go to after they tire of Bose.

Outside our room at the show. Our room is in the far right corner (actually to the right of the visible door there, out of sight in this picture). The towel in the door of the Chord room, and many others, is to allow the door to both close without locking, and to close quietly.

Another hallway on our floor, the 8th. That room at the end is the big Verity Lohengrin speaker room. Sortie means exit, which means the stairs in this case.