Anyone Attend RMAF?


Went to the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival and visited 60 rooms... some impressions:

Muraudio omni-directional speakers are amazing; Vandersteen audio is still making great speakers... and most rooms played really obscure and uninteresting music. Fun show though.

Anyone else go? thoughts? Best sound room?
robsker

Showing 1 response by robsker

Some more thoughts... most systems seem to be engineered to sound like refined stereos and not to approximate live music. This is seemingly true for even the 300-400K rooms. That is, almost every room had a stereo image placed dead in between the speakers where, if there was a trio with a singer, the singer, the piano, and the bass were all occupying essentially the same physical space (right on top of each other and dead center). This is, of course, not at all realistic. It does not matter how rich the tone, how detailed the sound, how dynamic the presentation --- if the image is like that (and it was in almost all the rooms) then what you have is something that is instantly recognizable as different from a real stage (where the piano is 6 feet to the left of the singer and the bass 5 feet to the right).

Also, many systems --- again even 300+K systems --- were very detailed and lacking in fullness, life, and soul. Without naming names, three of the biggest most advertised speaker brands had rooms that were characterized by refined, detailed, unrealistic and lifeless sound --- cool looking, big and flashy... but not overly musical.

That said, some comparatively inexpensive systems were quite nice (as were a few meg-systems --- the Muraudio and YG acoustics were nice --- not sterile, analytical and had good sound stage more akin to a stage than to a refined stereo (more life like).