Just wanted to share my impressions and a few pics from the RMAF last week. I want to thank Dave Cope and Paul Wood who graciously allowed me to use the Audio Note room as a home base during the show. Dave and Paul were very hospitable and were playing some great music as well!Overall there was some great sound at the show. There was also a lot of mediocre sound as well as a few rooms that just had plain bad sound.
The first system I heard was of course in the Audio Note room.
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The AN system was a bit higher end than I am accustomed to listening to. For most of the weekend Dave was running a pair of 2A3 Kageki's on the AN-E SEC Sivers with all Sogon cabling. The digital source was a DAC 4.1x and CDT 3 transport. Analog was a TT-1 with an IQ3 on Saturday and an IO1 with an AN-S4 step up on Sunday. All excellent gear. For $140,000 it had better be pretty nice. I agree with Jim's assesment however. There were a few problems in the room. First I agree with Dave that the walls in that room caused some ugly early sidewall reflections that kind of gave the uppermids and highs an uncharacterisitic brightness. Second The speakers were biwired from the crossovers but were only single wired to the amps. I felt that this may have contributed to a lack of transparency and loss of ultimate low frequency control and resolution. The system still sounded damn good. Don't get me wrong, but once you get an appreciation for what a properly wired AN system in a good room sounds like, then you realize that something was missing with this setup. Dave explained to me that all his demo gear was either sent from Deja Vu Audio in Virginia or had belonged to Audio Federation. Turns out by the time everything was unpacked and sorted out, there simply was not enough runs of Sogon speaker wire to go biwire all the way. Even though the room was not the best acoustically, I feel as if the systems performance would have been greatly improved with biwire all the way on the speakers. It does make that much of a difference I can attest.
Mark
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