Audio Federation - FSI 2006 - Festival Son & Image 2006

DAY 1
Festival Son & Image
The Montreal High-end Audio Show
March 24th, 2006

* Denotes a product carried by Audio Federation

Copyright © Audio Federation, Inc.. All rights reserved.
All pictures in this report are freely copyable and distributable.

Home

Magazine

Store

Guide

Blog

Music

The Filedio room. The sound just congealed in this room so that the great CDs recorded by Filelio, the Esoteric CD player (and even more so the Nagra reel-to-reel tape deck!), the Nagra solidstate and the Verity Audio Parsifal speakers come together in a wonderful whole.

The approximately $13.5K Vivid Audio speakers sounded very open and clean, even though one can hear limitations to due with comopression and muddiness in the systm as a whole. Driven by a Pathos integrated and Accuphase CD player.

The little Cabasse speakers are sounding might fine and well balanced up and down the frequency mountain in this system. CEC electronics.

A lovely display of finery in the Sonus Faber way. The Ayre electronics on the Sonus Faber Amatis (with their rear spikes taken off... ) on the other side of the room sounded very nice as well.

The Peak Consult speakers sounded as good as we have ever heard them being driven by experimental prototypes from David Berning and Meitner*, and that includes the statement amplifiers from Wavac, Zanden, VTL and on and on.

A box full of embarrassingly expensive tweaks that seem to actually work....But...

A shot over the bow of the MBL transport in the Kharma room.

A tonearm with the Brinkmann-EMT cartridge that also is supposed to sound great....and attempts to approximate linear tracking yet still is a tangential arm. But... uh....

A tube-powered watch....!

The NAIM speakers nearly flat against the wall. Playing Frank Zappa. 100 points for Gryffindor, uh, I mean the NAIM room. Any system that doesn't fall all over itself playing Zappa - well, it is a rare system indeed, if not quite magical.

The two-arm capable Brinkmann* Lagrange turntable with the new 12" arm.

Attractive Raysonic CD player.

The Manely display. Demonstrating the size of the Stingray in proportion to a CD.

A big BAT amplifier - trying to show just how massive the transformer is. It is massive. It is probably 3 times the size of my hand. Bad picture.

One of the bigger room setups: Verity, Wavac, dCS.

Kharma* announced and displayed for the first time their new little 2-way, the CE 3.1C in the $13K range (hey, I'm having a senior moment here, I'll remember the actual price sometime.....)

The very large Dynaudio room with Sim Audio electronics.

Chord on top of Conrad Johnson.

The Unison Sinfonia amp. Lovely stuff that Unison. Hopefully we will get to hear it sometime at one of these shows.

Large room with VTL driving the Eidolon Visions. This room had as much cool stuff on static display as they did active display (like the Unison) - so much more eye-candy coming your way.