2003 Montreal Audio Show (Le Festival Son & Image), March 28-30
Le Festival Son & Image is spread across 14 floors and two hotels may give you a partial glimpse into
why some say this Audio show ranks among the best in North America. For
me it allowed the maddening crowd to be spread away from places that I wanted
to spend time.
The last audio show I went to was two years ago in Toronto, the
exhibitors then had my sympathies. The Montreal shows tended to have better
overall setup with hotel rooms having good sound insulation between rooms to
minimize noise and maximizing the return on sitting down and listening.
Despite talking to myself about bring this and that to the show, I made a major
blunder in forgetting to bring my digital camera to the show. So I'll borrow
pics from other sites and point to you manufacturers links.
Take a look at these other show reports for 2003 Festival du Son & Image:
Enjoy The Music, Len Sabo A former 80's TAS writer finds music in the silver disks. Take a look at his music collection of classics. He like the Connoisseur SE-2 integrated 300B amplifier.
The variety, representation, and general setup quality put the show heads
and shoulders above the Toronto Home Entertainment show which did
not air last year. The emphasis is on "sound" and a admission that getting just two channels right is best route there (for now). About 10% of the setups were
video.
I saw Doug Schneider of SoundStage in the Connoisseur Audio , on the second day, room snapping a
picture of the Model SE-2 integrated Stereo amplifier. A 300B SET
design putting out a solid 3D layered soundfield that went beyond the
9 watts of output.
Beautifully crafted using
3 toroidal transformers (2 for the output transformer), it put Patricia Barber
into the room with bass, dynamics and that tube sound. They were on the fifth
floor of Four Points Sheraton Hotel. The speakers used were entry level JM Lab
Electro (Model 706)
Next to them was a North American distributor for
S.A.P . speakers. These were
homy looking speakers in the popular Audio Physics configuration of
mini-monitor atop a sideways firing bass unit in its own box.
The
tweeter was acoustically loaded by a horn and midrange/bass unit was
some sort of doped paper. The crossovers were paper-in-oil units.
A rack of AudioNote stuff (preamp, DAC, transport) drove a handmade
tube amp of Vu's design using an industrial output transformer.
Very nice midrage and clarity. Dynamics seemed muted relative to my
reference system but I came back to the room twice over the course of two days.
The show featured a "Show CD" called "Disque Officiel Du Festival"
assembled by Fidelio Audio . In English, it translate
to "Official Disk of the Festival".
They essentially bought their mastering setup to the show and easily had
the best sound of the show.
This is from the liner notes of the CD I bought:
"The whole recording system is kept to a minimum and is
without any compromise. It uses state of the art gear such as Nagra,
Sonosax, Verity Audio and gold laminated solid silver interconnect
cables by Siltec"
Note: the SAP room also had gold plated speaker cables. Right next door representing Sonus Faber was the reailer Filtronique. On hand was the Cremona Auditor speaker powered by a rack of Classe Audio electronics/transport. A REL subwoofer took care of the lower frequencies. Pretty decent sound.
Almost all of the exhibitors will more than willing to play favourite
cuts of CDs brought to the show by the likes of you and me. I kept my list
down to "10 Song Demo/Track 1", "Come On Come on/track 8, and "Good Dog, Bad Dog/Track 8". The exceptions are the rooms where units numbering 5 digits. These systems have garnered the "best" of the show awards over the years and attempt to give the public a semblence of the "next" level. For me, it always is somewhat of a dissapointment when my ears/body do not perk up to my long developed expectation. I found this to be true this time around for the big JML labs Grand Utopia and the Eggleston Works sourrond setup where I almost step on a 8ft run of Nordhost Vahalla cables (i.e. $40K) running to the back speakers about two feet from the wall. I guess I need more exposure to live music and setups that aspire to reproduce this. I heard the ASL Hurricanes and was not all that impressed by the sound and later found out that it earned a raved review in this month's TAS by HP. Go figure.
The one thing about a show is that you need to eat. My friend Martin took
me to a an amazing food court with "name escapes me" food (sort of greek but
better). Dinner was at "BarB Barn" and what trip would complete without a visit to the bagel shop at Parc and St. Viateur.
The Best...
Best Buy:
Show CD from Fidelio for $15
Best Freebee:
Stillpoint's damping strip...not sure if it is snakeoil
This month's issue of "Parts Xpress"
Best Sound:
Connoisseur Audio,
Classe/REL/Sonus Faber Cremona ,
Fidelio Audio,
SAP Quartette (Blue Cow),
Tenor Audio
That Planar Sound:
Martin Logan/Blue Circle, Newform Research
Best Aesthetics:
Shanling, Oracle Transport
High Expectations:
Halcro, UHF system, Eggleston Works/Halcro
Questionable Sound/Setup:
Song Audio, Wharfdale DVD setup
Most Played CD:
Norah Jones
The test of time/blast from the past:
StudioLab ,Oracle, Exposure, Naim, and Rega
I wish I spent more time there and played some music:
Blue Circle, Antique Sound Labs Hurricane
The one(s) that got away:
Kharma Ceramic Reference Monitor
