Made it back to South Florida by Monday evening and here it is half way through Tuesday already and I'm just going to put everything else on hold and summarize my thoughts on RMAF before I get buried in work again.
I can only opine on how things went in our room since I really didn't have the time to visit other rooms. Although I must say that the folks across the hall from us played the most horrific music I've ever heard pretty much nonstop. Really hardcore obscure electronic noise kind of stuff. Perhaps that's a new hipster marketing strategy. Good luck with that.
In our room you would have heard everything from Bach's wall shaking organ Toccata and Fugue to Lou Reed's Take A Wake on the Wild Side and everything in between including the usual suspects. I must say I haven't had this much fun in quite a while. Three long days of literally non-stop terrific music played on the best audio system I've ever heard. What's not to like?!!!
But really, the line-up of gear in our room sounded spectacular. Literally no fatigue...which was a huge blessing considering we spent upwards of 9-10 hours a day for 3 days listening to it along with our many visitors.
The gear & the team!
Source: Dell laptop running external hard drive with roughly 800 GB of FLAC in standard 16/44 rez plus a collection of CD's plus numerous tracks from customer CD/thumb-drives
DAC: Border Patrol non-oversampling R/2R ladder type - Gary Dews
Preamp: Tortuga Audio singled ended LDRx Passive Preamp - Morten Sissener
Amp: Border Patrol 300B SET - 8 watts/channel - Gary Dews
Speakers: Volti Alura hybrid horns with 15" bass reflex bottom and custom horn mid/tweeter - Greg Roberts
Cabling: Triode Wire Labs power/interconnects - Pete Grzybowski (say it 3 times fast).
Of course I'm biased but I lost count of the number of people who came to our room and told us we had the best system they'd heard all weekend. And I must say it did sound sweet. I found myself trying to rationalize buying Greg's amazing Alura speakers and taking them home with me. They were truly the jewel in the crown of our simple yet effective lineup if audio gear. Horn speakers that DO NOT SOUND LIKE horn speakers. And whoever thinks 300B's can't deliver bass or that a few watts/channel isn't enough to rock the house....we'll, you didn't visit our room to find out otherwise.
We had a generous amount of traffic all 3 days with Saturday being the most intense. What I really enjoyed was seeing a few folks come back a 2nd, 3rd and even a 4th time and spend upwards of an hour or more fully absorbed listening to our rig.
I also lost count of the number of existing Tortuga Audio customers who stopped by to say hello and a few kind words. Very very gratifying to meet happy customers.
From my perspective, RMAF14 was a great success and I really enjoyed the whole experience.
My sincere thanks to Gary, Pete & Greg for all the super sounds and for being a great team to work with.
Getting back down to sea level last night where I can breath again was also nice.
Cheers,
Morten
