Anyone Attend RMAF?

I got to about 50 rooms. I really really liked the Exemplar room on Sat afternoon. Even in a crummy room it had a lot that sounded right to me, where as most of the rooms did not. I got to hear Emerald Physics speakers for the first time. They were playing there new 2000.00 spkrs. I think it was my first experience with open baffle design. I thought good value for the money. Saw Rick Shultz explain magnetic signal induction. I still don't understand it. Maybe the explanation was intended that way. But nice of Rick to share that with whoever showed up. I liked his enthusiasm. Really a great event, for me probably one of the best of it's kind.

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).

I made it to a bunch of rooms on Saturday. The music selection was notably bad this year in my opinion. I was demo'ing the new vinyl of Roger Waters Amused to Death and played that in about 15 rooms that had turntables. My favorite sound was in the Zesto room, with a Merrill-Williams turntable running through a Zesto Andros phono stage to a Zesto preamp and the new Zesto monoblock amps, powering a pair of Kharma speakers. That room sounded great and I liked that at least most of the equipment there wasn't over the top expensive like some rooms. I would post my pic of that one here if I knew how.

I was impressed again with the Sanders setup, although I wish I could play some of my own tracks to see how they sound on that system. It sounds pretty amazing with their demo tracks, though.

Vapor Audio was good again and had happy hour at the end of the day, which was a nice bonus. I don't know if it was the setup or music selection in the NOLA room but it did not sound good when I was there. Very loud and overbearing sound.

I was also quite disappointed by the sound of the White Album in Mono which they played in its entirety with the new VPI top of the line turntable, a mono cartridge, and some Joseph Audio speakers. Very shrill on the high end and fatiguing to listen to, which of course could be from any number of things, but whatever the cause, it did not sound good to me.

I also enjoyed the Gamut setup. I wasn't familiar with that line before this show (Danish I think?) and I liked what I heard. I saw a lot of gorgeous turntables (Triangle Art, Pear Audio, Saskia, and Merrill-Williams), but of course it's difficult to gauge a turntable when you can't control any of the other variables or A/B it against another turntable.

Those are the things that stood out to me from the show. It seemed more crowded this year but that may be because I usually go on Sunday. But I had a great time overall and will be back again next year!

Robsker - I didnt attend the show but have similar feelings on the trend with some super high end name speakers and systems I have heard at dealers. Precision bulldozes musicality. My best guess is some people enjoy sound more than music. To each his own.