See you at RMAF 2014!

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. Read 7222 times.

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
See you at RMAF 2014!
« on: 22 Jul 2014, 04:56 pm »
Tortuga Audio is planning to be at the 2014 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in October.

In addition to Tortuga Audio's LDRx/LDRxB Passive Preamp, we'll be co-showing one of Volti Audio's (http://www.voltiaudio.com) remarkable hand crafted horn speakers.

If you're attending the RMAF please plan to stop by and see us.

Cheers,  :thumb:
Morten

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #1 on: 7 Aug 2014, 03:43 pm »
We will be in room 1022 at the 2014 RMAF

Our partners will include:
Speakers:  Volti Audio
Cables: Triode Wire Labs

Hope to see some of you there!

Cheers,
Morten





TomS

Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #2 on: 7 Aug 2014, 04:18 pm »
Volti should bring you a lot of traffic, as he always brings terrific speakers. Greg and Pete do a great demo too. Good luck and see you there!

Triode Pete

  • Industry Contributor
  • Posts: 1424
  • www.TriodeWireLabs.com
    • Triode Wire Labs - Affordable Audiophile Cables
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #3 on: 7 Aug 2014, 09:23 pm »
Hi Morten,
I'm looking forward to teaming up with you at RMAF!  :thumb:

We will have a great sounding room!  :thumb:

Cheers,
Pete

glynnw

  • Full Member
  • Posts: 989
  • I have tin ears.
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #4 on: 7 Aug 2014, 11:58 pm »
Great choice.  That room was always packed last year and Greg still had time to talk to me about veneering.  Looking forward to seeing you there.

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #5 on: 8 Aug 2014, 12:19 pm »
Great choice.  That room was always packed last year and Greg still had time to talk to me about veneering.  Looking forward to seeing you there.

Greg/Volti will have their own main room this year as before. We are sharing a second room that I will run that will feature another line of Volti speakers in addition to our preamps. I'm looking forward to meeting customers in person. Time to put down the soldering iron and interface with humans for a change.  :thumb:

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #6 on: 8 Aug 2014, 12:21 pm »
Hi Morten,
I'm looking forward to teaming up with you at RMAF!  :thumb:

We will have a great sounding room!  :thumb:

Cheers,
Pete

Hi Pete,
Very much looking forward to a fun show. Good to have you on board. :green:
Cheers,
Morten

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #7 on: 6 Oct 2014, 10:24 pm »
Heading off to RMAF14 in the AM and shutting down Tortuga operations until we get back. Will be up and running again on the 14th. To all of our backlogged customers....have patience. It will be worth the wait. If you're going to the show please stop in and say hello. Room 1022.  :thumb:

Cheers,
Morten

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Day 1 at RMAF14
« Reply #8 on: 11 Oct 2014, 02:25 am »
We survived day 1 and all in all I thought it went very well. Of course no show is without its challenges. Arrived a couple of days early and soon discovered the external drive with nearly 1 GB of FLAC files was having intermittent connectivity problems. Was it the laptop or the drive. Oh shit! So it was off to Best Buy for a new drive. Next step was transferring the tunes from the bad drive to the new drive. Finally got that rolling. Time to complete.....28 hours! Yikes! I only had 20 hours before it was time to go set up and get everything working. So it was off to the room with roughly 75% transferred. Got up through most of the T's including most of the "The_____" bands.

Once we got the room roughly set up it was time for sound checks. It was immediately clear that the DAC I'd brought was not quite up to playing varsity ball. Fortunately, one of our partners, Border Patrol, had a very nice DAC in reserve which we threw into the breach with very nice results. Only drawback was it couldn't handle hirez files but otherwise it performed wonderfully.

Our lineup included around 700 GB of FLAC files on a Dell running JRiver Media Center via USB into the Border Patrol DAC, then the Tortuga Audio LDRx Passive Preamp into a Border Patrol 300B SET amp with mondo dual power supplies that I swear must be filled with solid copper connected at last to Volti Audio's substantial (and beautiful) 3-way, hybrid bass-reflex/horn speakers. Last but not least everything was powered and interconnected with Triode Wire Labs cable.

After some adjusting and repositioning we finally arrived at a wonderful sounding arrangement where we positioned the speakers along the long wall rather than the typical short wall. Thanks to Greg Roberts at Volti for this approach.

What I can report is that after over 6 hours of essentially non-stop music that system sounded absolutely marvelous and if anything improved over the course of the day as the preamp got some well needed burn-in. Yes, that's right...burn-in. I'm now convinced that LDRs do in fact go through a burn-in process. Several customers have reported similarly.

We had great traffic all afternoon including some notable members of the audio press. You can't bullshit people at shows. Your stuff either sounds good or it doesn't. It was quite clear that practically everyone who spent time in our room really enjoyed it. And we ended up playing everything from Brahms to Beatles and even threw in some Jethru Tull not to mention acapella versions of Beach Boys tunes. Sure, we had tons of jazz and classical as well. And Daft Punk!!

My favorite comment was the guy who came back late in the afternoon to let us know that after visiting 26 rooms, he came back to ours announcing we were his best in show so far. Nice.

And it was also great running into numerous customers from places including Delaware, Wyoming and Louisiana.

All in all a very good day.  :thumb:

Best,
Morten

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #9 on: 11 Oct 2014, 02:32 am »
Pez & Tyson's post on our room at RMAF. I'm the guy on the right looking like a madman standing next to Pete Grzybowski from Triode Wire Labs.

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=129359.msg1366583#msg1366583

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #10 on: 14 Oct 2014, 06:06 pm »
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.  :lol:

Cheers, :thumb:
Morten

jtwrace

  • Full Member
  • Posts: 11415
  • www.theintellectualpeoplepodcast.com
    • TIPP YouTube Channel
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #11 on: 14 Oct 2014, 06:11 pm »
Great to meet you!  I must say this room was one of my favs.  If not, THE fav.   :thumb:


Thanks for letting me play all my tunes from Alice in Chains to Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show.   :D

Vedder323

  • Full Member
  • Posts: 494
  • vinyl reviews and more, check out Newrecordday.com
    • New Record Day
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #12 on: 14 Oct 2014, 09:31 pm »
I'm finishing up my coverage. Both 1022 and 1102 were my "best in show" picks. Well done!!!

Triode Pete

  • Industry Contributor
  • Posts: 1424
  • www.TriodeWireLabs.com
    • Triode Wire Labs - Affordable Audiophile Cables
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #13 on: 15 Oct 2014, 05:02 pm »
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.  :lol:

Cheers, :thumb:
Morten

Hey Morten,
It was a pleasure to meet you and I had a "blast" teaming up with you at RMAF Room 1022! We had great synergy going with Gary Dews Border Patrol amps & DAC, Greg Roberts Volti Alura's and your wonderful LDR preamp. Your LDR preamp let the 300B SET amplifier shine through with remarkable transparency. There were several songs (like Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side") that were reproduced better than I have EVER heard. Also Bach's Toccata & Fugue and Buddy Guy's "I'm an Old Man"...scary real (poor Dave Elledge - his "song of the day") LOL!

Don't forget our Saturday's 6 PM closing song - Rihanna's S&M... It's pretty amazing on how ~6 watts of powerful (due to massive power supplies) SET magic can transform a floor into a night club with very clean, very loud punch! Pretty funny that the little English guy down the hall threatened to close us down!... and they say 300B's or SET's don't have bass! LOL!

Once again your LDR preamp was amazing! I'll probably be contacting you to purchase a single-ended version for my Tannoy system with 300B SET monoblocks. Your preamp will displace a custom 171A linestage with dual regulated tube power supplies!

Cheers,
Pete

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #14 on: 27 Oct 2014, 05:27 pm »

Volti Audio

  • Industry Participant
  • Posts: 23
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #15 on: 3 Nov 2014, 03:04 am »
Thank you Morten and Pete for doing such a great job of representing the Volti speakers in room 1022.  You guys are class acts! 

I think you could have played 'Take a Walk On The Wild Side' all weekend on that system!  Very impressive. 

Greg

jtwrace

  • Full Member
  • Posts: 11415
  • www.theintellectualpeoplepodcast.com
    • TIPP YouTube Channel
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #16 on: 3 Nov 2014, 03:06 am »
Thank you Morten and Pete for doing such a great job of representing the Volti speakers in room 1022.  You guys are class acts! 

I think you could have played 'Take a Walk On The Wild Side' all weekend on that system!  Very impressive. 

Greg
Everything sounded great on that system.  When will you be moving to TN? 

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #17 on: 3 Nov 2014, 03:07 pm »
Thank you Morten and Pete for doing such a great job of representing the Volti speakers in room 1022.  You guys are class acts! 

I think you could have played 'Take a Walk On The Wild Side' all weekend on that system!  Very impressive. 

Greg

Thanks and back atcha Greg. Delightful experience. You know you have a great system if 3 full days of non-stop listening  doesn't cause fatigue.  :thumb:

Triode Pete

  • Industry Contributor
  • Posts: 1424
  • www.TriodeWireLabs.com
    • Triode Wire Labs - Affordable Audiophile Cables
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #18 on: 6 Nov 2014, 01:35 am »
Thanks and back atcha Greg. Delightful experience. You know you have a great system if 3 full days of non-stop listening  doesn't cause fatigue.  :thumb:

Back at both you as well!!!

To me, that was the best sounding system (even in a crappy hotel room!) I've heard in a long time!!! Morten's preamp was so transparent, letting Gary Dew's incredible BorderPatrol 300B SET to really shine and show off its amazing attributes...

I was so impressed that I'm traveling to Maryland early Saturday morning to pick-up that RMAF Room 1022 amp from Gary!

Cheers,
Pete

tortugaranger

  • Facilitator
  • Posts: 1746
  • Handcrafted high performance audio
    • Tortuga Audio
Re: See you at RMAF 2014!
« Reply #19 on: 15 Nov 2014, 02:56 pm »
Quote
Tortuga Audio showed the LDRx passive preamp ($1495) software driven and digitally controlled unit with resistive analog attenuator using light resistive diodes. The LDRx seemed to be a perfect fit despite its affordable pricing, helping the system have a clear and transparent presentation, wide stage, and big dynamic contrasts, kudos for bringing such great performance at a low cost.

Quote from EnjoyTheMusic.com coverage of the recent RMAF2014 show. The full commentary on our room can be found here:
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/rmaf_2014/holt/RMAF_Show_Report_Part_1_2.htm

They got "diodes" mixed up with "resistors" but otherwise spot on.  :thumb: