Audio Federation - RMAF 2007 - Rocky Mountain Audio Fest Show Report: Denver, Colorado

Floor 1

RMAF
Rocky Mountain Audio Fest
Denver
Sunday October 12th, 2007

* Denotes a product carried by Audio Federation

Copyright © Audio Federation, Inc.. All rights reserved.
All pictures in this report are freely copyable and distributable.

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The Fry Street Quartet was playing down on the lobby. They hadn't started yet and I had to move on to finish floor 1 so was not able to hang out and listen. Heard they were pretty good and Neli, I think, has one of their CDs.

Teres Audio displayed the Cogent speakers which the rumor has it they are now distributing. Personally, this particular system didn't do it for me - at least it hasn't in the last two system I heard it in. The music was compressed, atonal, uneven. It is indeed a very large room, like the next one below, but I was listening right up front.

Audio Magic had a booth outside the larger rooms. Interesting display boxes. It is like they are exposing some of their power conditioner's innards but not all?

Big horns. Big room. The two horns closest to the center were playing. The notes died too early in this room. They all did. There would be a sound, perhaps even a powerful bass note, but then it would rapidly diminish in SPLs like it was abruptly cut off. So it ended up sounding anemic to me. This was a large room, and maybe the notes got eaten (ate?) up by all the space, but... these ARE horn speakers.

Zu Audio had a live duo play music through their speakers. The room was too big, and the sound was anemic from this system as well. It would have sounded better with some Genelec or other pro / active speakers. In L.A. when they did something like this they had way more speakers and custom subwoofers to address the alrge space.

The Hansen loudspeakers. Yes, we like the sound of these, but we like them more when they are not firing into a table. I just bet they weren't too happy with this setup. :-)

So, as you might have guessed, I was unable to evaluate the sound of the big Boulder on these speakers because of the table, the slope of the room, etc.

The Usher room. There weren't many people on this floor - this year most decided to go upstairs. And one elevator was broken the whole show. Maybe they all got trapped up there? There were stairs, and I used them to go up and down the 9 - 11 stories - impatient and all. But, anyway, not many people in these rooms.

They were chatting with a visitor (there was only one visitor at this time) in this room about some esoteric (not Esoteric) technical aspect of something-or-other. There was no music. But we can all kind of guess what it sounded like - from numerous similar systems and numerous similar shows....

This year, like last year, Ray Kimber set up a bunch of Soundlab loudspeakers in a surround sound configuration, driven by Pass Lab amplifiers and Emm Labs digtial.

After these photos were taken I sat behind the guy in the bright red shirt (who is actually Constantine Soo of Dagogo. I saw him everywhere).

The sound was much more dynamic, as the speakers were closer in, closer to the listener this year. It was fun and enjoyable, although I only heard fairly simple pieces of music while I was here.

Part of the demo involved playing the same music on these Sony speakers, setup in the same surround sound configuration.

The difference?

The Sony speakers generated a much more defined image in the front center.

The Sony speakers midrange was mid-fi-ish in that it was stripped of some amount of color and the decay was all wrong.

The Soundlab* speakers do have the limitations of electrostatics: bass is organic, not punchy, and notes just appear, as opposed to be thrust at the listener - but they offer a much more engrossing and sophisticated listening experience.

Yeah, is looks fuzzy to me too. Ray Kimber said that Sony was growing special trees for these speakers. Yes, Sony, that is indeed geeky, but first, just make them sound as good as possible, OK?

The rear of the Soundlabs. You know, these ARE kind of big speakers, aren't they. 9 feet tall. Somebody just needs to do a solid wall of these, in say a circular or hexagonal room....