What were the best and worst rooms at RMAF 2009?

I echo TVAD's assessment of the fabulous Bel Canto room. . . incredibly engaging and refined.

My absolute preference in the hotel, regardless of price goes to the GamuT room with their big mono amps and the large GamuT towers. Performance of the Bach organ Toccata Adagio and Fugue in C minor was visceral, 3 dymensional, emotionally engrossing, and superbly listenable without a hint of fatigue.

If I include suites outside the hotel, my preference would go to the large showroom at Soundings Hifi across the parking lot: Boulder CDp, Boulder 2010 pre, Rowland 312 stereo amp, Vienna Die Muzick speakers. Similar to the Gamut room for staging, imaging, authority, extension, fantastic ease of listening. . . exceeding GamuT for low level detail and harmonic resolution. speakers in both rooms were set up by true masters of the craft. . . the designer of the GamuT speakers and Rod Tomson at Soundings. . . both Masters of the craft.

I was also delighted by the Belles/Usher/JPS room. . . what a graceful and revealing amp Belles makes. . . definitely the kind of amp I'd be proud to own and the Usher speakers are delicious. . . . but everything would not have worked if the wiring had been any less synergistic than the JPS wires.

I really wanted to hear the new Chapter electronics based on a very advanced class D design but they were not connected.

Cullen/Wired4Sound was quite delightful in the $2K price range fine imaging and speed and particularly fine treble resolution. W4S is working on a reference level amp that will include a user selectable tube/SS input section. . . very promising and I am very much looking forward to hearing it.

Perhaps the most Uber-Bestest room of them all was. . . the bar in the evenings. . . mixing with fellow audiophools is the most fun experience of the show!

Saluti e buone cose,

Guido

PS. The very worst rooms were very very very bad and are left. . . anonymous.

DCSTEPs cautioning about the origin of the slight limitations of the Gamut room are absolutely on the money. The room was too alive and somewhat too large for optimal results, regardless of speaker setup. A handclap test I performed exposed a painfully high amount of uncontrolled slap-echo. In spite of room limitations, Lars of GamuT addressed the initial unspecificity in the mid bass by repeatedly tweaking the positioning of the speakers until the very final session on Sunday with results that in the end were very impressive. Dave and I played once again Bach's organ Toccata Adagio and Fugue in C-minor Sunday afternoon and the result was tremendous. No mid bass wobble could be detected at all. . . bass was deep, taught and as tuneful as I could expect from a top flight large system. As we did not repeat the playback of the piano and string quintet tracks by Dvorak, I do not know if low level resolution was in the end les/greater than the Vienna/Boulder/Rowland suite at Soundings. In the end room interactions may still have been a factor in my slight pref for the musicality of the latter.

Regarding the Bel Canto room in 589-590. . . yes, the sound of the room was not 'warm' to my ears. . . rather, I found it to be rather neutral with a very slight overpressure in the treble region, and a minor tendency to intermodulate in harmonically complex sostenuto passages in the upper treble. The overall gracefulness of the sound was perhaps that is one of the reasons why DCSTEP and I remained there for the better part of an hour or may be even more, in spite of a slight tendency to tippiness in the treble that made the sound suboptimal. As I am not even faintly familiar with the Joseph Audio house sound, I have no idea about its impact on the overall result. However, being quite familiar with the sound of the suite from last year, with Bel Canto Ref series sonic signature, and having found XLO somewhat tipped up for my preference over the years, I am inclined to impute some of the slight treble anomalies to the wiring.

Lastly, a generic recommendation for manufacturers to refrain from public electronic joustings with the customer set. The 'high road' may be found to be a more effective corporate markcom technique in the long run. G.

All, I made a major factual mistake in my previous post, for which I apologize to all concerned: suite 589, where I listened to the excellent bel Canto Ref 500M mono amps, was completely wired with Cardas Clear, NOT with XLO. Hence any reference to XLO in my previous post is completely unwarranted and should be ignored

. The paragraph in question should have read:

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Regarding the Bel Canto room in 589-590. . . yes, the sound of the room was not 'warm' to my ears. . . rather, I found it to be rather neutral with a very slight overpressure in the treble region, and a minor tendency to intermodulate in harmonically complex sostenuto passages in the upper treble. The overall gracefulness of the sound was one of the reasons why DCSTEP and I remained there for the better part of an hour or may be even more, in spite of a slight tendency to tippiness in the treble that made the sound suboptimal. As I am not even faintly familiar with the Joseph Audio house sound, nor with the Cardas Clear wires, I have no idea about their relative impact on the overall result. However, being quite familiar with the sound of the suite from last year, as well as with the extremely graceful Bel Canto Ref series sonic signature, I am inclined to exonerate completely the BC R500M from being the origin of the very slight treble anomalies, which may have been caused by something as simple as speaker placement issues.

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PS. This morning I had requested via email that Audiogon staff nuke my previous post entirely, so I could resubmit it cleanly with the amendment above. Unfortunately, the duty administrator tersely declined my request, stating that removing posts is against policy. This of course is quite surprising in view of historical data. It is also a sad commentary about the apparent dualism still existing between the new and friendly image that Audiogon is fostering through its "Hub", and a much more basic reality persisting in the trenches, which makes me seriously consider alternate audiophilic climes.

Regards, G.

In Vandersteen room Shunyata was used: King Cobra CX, and Stratos if I recall correctly. G.

Norm, my feeling about underpowered amplification exactly. . . I felt that the Vandy 7 could have used the more powerful Ref 220s to shine. Guido

I second (or third) the Esoteric room. . . I was particularly taken by comparing on X-01 D2 playback of redbook tracks as PCM, and then repeating listening with conversion to DSD. . . very convincing to my ears and my musical prefs. G.