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… 🙂