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California Audio Show 2012

It was just serendipity that we happened to be on a family visit to Northern California the same weekend as the start of the 2012 California Audio Show in
Burlingame, California. I literally had only about 90 minutes to poke around today on the opening day of the show, so take my impressions with a very large grain of salt... but I wanted to get a thread started for others who may have their own impressions to post.

Sweetest sound in my whirlwind tour of the show was in the Audio Note UK room. Amplification was some $20K+ 8 watt tube amp. Speakers were large stand mounts... didn't get the model number. Sound was extraordinarily musical... mesmerizing, really, so much so that I had to get back to that room one more time for a second listen before I had to leave. The AN rep was playing some "audiophile" discs I'd never heard before. Would've loved to have heard some familiar tunes on that setup. But wow, that system was very sweet, indeed.

YG Acoustics room.... sounded rather "hi-fi" to me, but again, I spent very little time there.

Magico rooms -- the big Magico's sounded terrific playing orchestral music. The small monitors $27K, yikes!) sounded good too, if a little tipped up in the high end.

Biggest disappointment in my brief time there was the room playing the new Gallo CL-4's. They sounded congested and muffled. I have to believe there was a set up problem of some sort... a company of Gallo's reputation wouldn't unleash anything sounding that mediocre!

Anybody else get to the show with impressions to share?
rebbi

Showing 3 responses by drubin

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drubin
3,265 posts
 
Agree with you about Audio Note. Their rooms pretty much always sound the way this one does -- unfailing in communicating the music and connecting you with it, and without much regard to genre or even recording quality.

Also agree about the Gallos and must add that the dealer whose room that was had three others. Only one of the four rooms had anything approaching decent sound (Margules + Dynaudio) despite all sorts of fancy cables and isolation devices and room treatments adorning all of them.

Some other notables for me: Eficion, Voce (check out the vintage Luxman TT in that room in addition to their new speakers), Sonist, and Music First. The Music First room was manned by Jonathan Billington himself (lovely man) and featured their Reference preamp fed by an old Revox R2R and feeding a Bel Canto ICE amp and a pair of Rogers LS3/5a's he picked up in a thrift shop. Hardware store speaker cables. Wonderful sound, I thought.
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drubin
3,265 posts
 
The Gallos sounded much better on Saturday. I also spent more time with the Dynaudio Focus 340's and Margules yesterday. Excellent. And as Audioquest was part of that room, the digital source was a Macbook Pro with the Dragonfly USB DAC (which looks like and is deployed like a USB thumb drive). Very impressive.

Agree about the Tone of Music room -- lovely sound. And that Simon Yorke TT is a work of art. There sure are a lot of small monitors these days at you-could-buy-a-nice-car-for-this prices.

Another shout out for the Voce Audio speakers on the third floor. The way they are put together is very interesting and sonically they ticked a great many boxes for me.

I thought the show was great overall and I hope it was a success for the exhibitors and Constantine. Small, but plenty of good and interesting rooms. And because it wasn't too large or crowded, I felt very comfortable spending a decent amount time in rooms that interested me, or going back a second time. Had a lot of good conversations with exhibitors. I made two extended visits to the Zu Audio room, which, as always, had the most interesting music. Sean Casey is The Man as far as I'm concerned.
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drubin
3,265 posts
 
I think we're seeing an arms race in several areas: cabinet materials, cabinet construction methods, driver materials, and crossover components. (Just going with top of the line Mundorf caps can send parts costs into the stratosphere.) Whether or not these yield meaningful sonic improvements is another matter, of course.
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