Audio Troy Capital Audio Fest the good, the bad and the ugly!


Just came back from the great Capital Audio Fest.

A lot of great rooms, a few surprises, missing brands, and some winners and losers.

The great:

Doug Whites The Voice that is system of Tidal gear, Innous Statement, and Tidal loudspeakers just was stunning sounding.

The big Genesis system in the Vpi room was quite excellent. 

The Old Forge room's Sound Kaos speakers were superb.

The Cat room with the Kef Blades proved the Kef Blades are a true contender with way more expensive loudspeakers.

Dadelius speakers sounded very good, unfortunately the system was $200k!

The Bad:

The $120k Devore's new reference speakers were good but not $120k good at this demo

More to come.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
128x128audiotroy

Showing 1 response by gnjtack

Hello all,
I just wanted to clarify a post by pops regarding our Pass Labs amps as being down on Friday at CAF.
The XS150 monoblocks were not down.
As anyone who was in the hotel Thursday night may have heard, we had a wicked thunderstorm move into the area.
Lightning actually hit the hotel....awesome noise !!!
Anyway after that, the power was down for a bit in certain areas. as well as the wifi.
Friday morning just before the show we tried to play a record, we found the Pass labs phono and preamp units blue lights were suspiciously low in intensity and nothing would work. One of the active subwoofer amps would not work as well.
I remedied that problem by running both sub channels off of one sub amp and running the subs in mono.
Low voltage was the cause, no doubt the massive power supplies in the Pass XS150’s were hogging all the juice.
Alex the engineer from our partner Basis, a New Hampshire company employed the help of another N.H. company LKV Research to lend us a phono unit , MANY THANKS !!
This unit drew less juice than the Pass and it got us through Friday.
Regarding the sound, the whole system was running on low voltage , something those massive Pass XS150’s dont like. Also it was not sufficiently warmed up on Friday.
By Saturday everything was warming, the voltage stabilized and the system started to bloom.
Wish pops could have made it back, the system was really shining.
Many visitors loved it as did reviewers.
I got a call a few days after CAF, a gentleman purchased the speaker and subwoofer system.
It was a shaky start to CAF 2019, I had a few heart stopping moments, but it turned out to be our best showing to date.
See you next year.
Greg
GTAW