It is like, because ours are one of the few show reports that says something about the sound - specifically the descriptions about good sounding rooms and not so good sounding rooms - and with the abundance of all those 'feel good' show reports - it makes these look plain unhappy in comparison.

But, in fact, we like going to shows, though some better than others because of the quality of the sound in the rooms. Ranking the shows:

CES has the best sound, and some awful sound.

Montreal has a lot of good sound and some awful sound

RMAF has a lot of good sound

Stereophile Shows have some good sound and a lot of not so good sound.

Although many people told me about rooms that sounded awful at RMAF this year, in my tour through, I think, just about all of them, I did not have shut down my ears during any of my photos. Now, it is true that I did not take as many photos and therefore did not have to stay in any room for very long - but still, I think that the trend for the worst sound at shows to be slowly improving over time is still in existence.

Because we exhibited at this show there was not a lot of time for photographing and listening to all the rooms at the show. Even though we made a modest attempt here to cover what happened - you will notice that the quantity and quality is below that of our other show reports (for example, our recent CEDIA show report has over twice the number of photos this one has).

Also, it is sometimes depressing to write about what is wrong with all the systems that have major problems. Sometimes, the hype that a particularly poor system is the best thing since Edison invented everything stirs up a need for a countervailing blow for the truth, but in general I prefer talking about systems that sound good (although I like photographing everything and making them look as awesome as possible in Photoshop, all equipment is great looking, to my taste - it is just that some of it you just don't want to ever plug in).

I like writing about very inexpensive systems that are (much!) more enjoyable than most of the big boys, like Almarro (sometimes), Odyssey Audio, the Star Sound Caravelle loudspeaker, the Acoustic Zen Adagio speaker (which we now carry) and little Audio Note U.K. systems (which we carry).

I like writing about the expensive equipment that rocket the listener to wonderful new mental states of mind - most of which we now carry, albeit with a few exceptions because other local dealers carry the lines.

And lastly there is the new equipment with much promise now being developed like the Cogent True-to-Life horn speakers.

It is fun to listen to 'the good stuff' and it is fun to write about it. The other stuff is not fun. If there weren't so many people, mistakenly or not, often in the industry, saying how great some of the uh, equipment that is not likely to have a wide appeal, sounded, all of my show reports would be happy happy and the people with rooms that did not sound good could work hard in peace to get it better next year.

But nooooOOOOOOoooooo.

You have people who have no care or concern about what good sound is pontificating this and that for all sorts of reasons unrelated to that of helping people find and build systems for themselves that they will like. There has to be someone who speaks out against all the nonsense - right now it appears to be us (and I am purposely ignoring and will continue to ignore those whose profession and popularity stems largely from, seemingly, proclaiming that everything is nonsense, whether it is or not).

So, even though this report is a little weak, because of time constraints, at this time with respect to the Defense Against the Dark Arts of Audio Obfuscation, we will be back in full force at the next show if all things go as planned.

And of course, in the meantime, there is always the blog.

Oh, Best of Show: The Kharma* Midi Exquisite / MBL room. [Even though I think our two rooms were better, it is hard to be impartial, so it is easiest to just exclude our rooms from the running altogether).

The parts 2, 3, and 4 of this report have mostly just photos, a little commentary, and the names of the companies sponsoring the room. If you want to know product names and prices and stuff, as usual check out Dave and Carol's reports at Positive Feedback (scroll to the bottom).

Well, the big box in the middle comes with the speakers. It has two built-in 2000 watt (into a 4 ohm load) amplifiers that drive the two bass towers that handle all frequencies below 100 Hz. It also contains an active crossover.

The other boxes are the pair of Edge Signature One solid-state amplifiers and the pair of Audio Note U.K. Kegon 300B SET amplifiers. These other amplifiers drive the main towers which handle frequencies above 60Hz. During the show we mostly used the 22 watt Kegon amplifiers.

Everything has 3 HRS Nimbus Couplers / Spacers to couple the component to the rack in order to further tame bad vibrations. Except, that is, the two M10 power supplies, which were too tall, and were in too tight of a fit, to allow room underneath them for the Nimbuses. Guess we left our super-computer at home.

There were some concerns about the amps clipping at very high volumes on very dynamic pieces. Personally, I will take quality of sound: emotion, sophistication, magic, realness, naturalness, over the ability to play 'at any volume'. I mean, we (Neli and Leif) played this system LOUD. Louder than rooms I typically like to go in when I attend a show. Funny, no matter how loud a system is there is always someone telling me that they listen to their system 10 times as loud - which is not to say that they actually listen to it that loud (which would take 22 times 10 to the tenth power watts which I think requires hooking up their system to the Sun) but that they want to be able to listen to it that loud.  Many of these people suggested we bring a large solid-state amp to the show next year - and we do have the 800 watt Edge Reference 'pyramid' amplifiers that we brought last year... :-)

We had Jorma Design 'Prime' cable in the main tower speakers and their 'No. 1' cable on the bass towers. 'Prime' is used internally to the speakers, but we did not have enough Jorma 'Prime' to put on the bass units. All-in-all we did not notice any problems with this slight lack in symmetry to the cabling - but then again we (Neli and I) had not heard the bass units with the 'Prime' cable, otherwise I think we would have been really jonesing to have Prime for both runs of speaker cable.

We used a 10 meter run of Nordost Valhalla interconnect to get the signal from the racks to the amps.

There is some discussion on this topic by a number of people on the blog: Positive Feedback's comments on our rooms

I am not sure what effect the newness of the M10 had, but the speakers did have some reticence in the mids and upper mids, as one might expect, sometimes causing the upper mids to sound a little hard and evidencing an overall compression to transients in these frequencies.

During the 4 days that we played them at the show - the speakers sound changed radically. In the first few days, before the show, they changed from hour to hour. In the beginning there was an obvious harshness to the upper mids and lower treble that was just about completely gone by the end of the show - finally occurring only once every hour or two. Personally, I think it is amazing that after only two hundred hours of play, that they sounded so good - we usually recommend 600 to 1000 hours of break-in for speakers.

Before the show, we had some concerns whether these speakers would be able to fill the room with sound - especially compared to some large horn speakers with which we are quite familiar (OK, yes, the Acapella Triolon Excalibur). We like that BIG sound and we were hoping these would also do BIG. Within about 5 seconds of the first CD we played on the show system Neli and I looked at each other with big smiles - these speakers do BIG alright, and in a more controlled, frequency agnostic fashion, with greater resolution in the mids and bass, with more slam, but sacrificing an acceptable (to us, and I think we are darn picky) amount of purity in the treble to the plasma tweeter.

A lot of people ask us the $250K question: are the Coltrane Supremes better than the Triolons? Is the Grand Canyon better than Yellowstone National Park? The question is kind of meaningless unless one defines exactly what one is measuring when one compares these two giants. We can say that we are VERY happy and we are looking forward to many, many years of hearing music through what, yes, are the best all-round speakers we ever heard.

When I first placed the speakers and rack, I was concerned that the corner on the right there was not a real corner (the speakers like to be in a corner) and that the heater unit there behind the right channel was not really a wall. I wondered if Dave Cope, who is the Audio Note rep and who was playing music in this room most of the time, might change the configuration to the long wall, which had two real honest-to-goodness corners. He was probably thinking like I was that there really wasn't a heckuva lot of time to be messing around trying things out - and if the short wall worked - let's just stick with it. Often the most important thing is not mucking with the room but to warm up the system and to keep it warm.

This room was a disappointment for me - and after recommending this room before the show to many people. I hear tell that the sweet spot sounded pretty good, but even though I was within a few inches of the sweet spot (the chairs were such during my second listen that no one was able to sit in the sweet spot) it just sounded like any ole speaker to me. It didn't have that magic and separation and natural bloom that I have heard before with these drivers and this amplifier.

These speakers look a lot nicer than the old square white ones but the old design, using the same (or worse) amps, had a wonderful sound, even far outside the sweet spot. See our reviews on location: and at the last CES show: The Cogent True-to-life Horn Speakers at CES 2006.

Just goes to show how every little thing is important - that having great drivers like the Cogent field coil compression drivers is not always enough.

Without something warm in the system it was quite cold and impersonal sounding, as expected. Imaging was weird, and a center image did not form during the time I spent in the room with the music I heard played. Notes kind of bounced around... I mean, the apparent distance between keys on a musicians keyboard is now, what, 3 feet? 6? Any small problems in setup and room acoustic seem like they would be magnified by just the tremendous size of the whole thing.

But the majesty of the setup is hard to communicate, the almost futuristic like presence of Technology with a capital 'T', or maybe it was more reminiscent of a cathedral, or perhaps it was the feeling of being present at what was at core a 'display fantastic', ...

I thought this was the best sound at the show (ignoring our own rooms for sake of fairness). I heard some people say that they thought the MBL electronics was too cool sounding for this system - but I thought the characteristic musicality of the Midi's, and Kharma loudspeakers in general, showed through just fine - however I do not require much warmth to enjoy a system, very slightly to the warm side of neutral is where I like it.

Emotion, Enjoyability, Emotion, Naturalness, Emotion, with a lot of transparency which made it seem fairly Real, and the potential to be Impressive was also there, but for the severe bass nodes in the room which limited the bass somewhat unless one wanted to the bass to overwhelm the rest of the music - and I didn't.

These are the Midi's with the new bass drivers. Yes, the bass is tighter - but more important, from my perspective, is that some imaging / sound-staging anomalies that were present in the previous Midi are now gone. Just plain gone. No, it doesn't have the world renowned imaging / sound-staging / disappearing act of the Kharma 3.2 and Mini Exquisite 2-way speakers - but for a 3-way, which have much harder road to travel to get this right, the Midi is now world class. Combined with the Kharma 'sound', these speakers are perfect for those that want the Kharma sound, with lots of bass, in a larger-sized room.

Like us.

We have the Mini Exquisite speakers here at our showroom - and I know we should get the 3.2 next, or even the 3.1c, for the store but.... these would just kick butt in our second listening room... OK, Neli?

We've heard this system a few times before. It is always very nice. But we hadn't seen the Kharma's in blue before, so before this is all over I'm afraid we are going to subject everyone to a lot of photos of the blue 3.2's.