Hi all, just a quick note regarding THE SHOW at the St Tropez in Las Vegas.
IT WAS A GAS!!!
I drove in on Friday (I'll spare the trip and weather details) and cruised over to the VMPS room first thing.
WOW!! a beautiful pair of Rosewood Brian Cheney Signature Editions and a Single Lightly Figured Maple smack in the center staring at me.
What a great job Mark Schifter does with our cabinets
Midwall on the right side was a six foot high "BANK" of no less than 7 AMPzilla Chassis.
Three Son of Ampzillas were running each RM40 full range. Only a single channel of each was used for a total of 100 watts to each.
I have to tell you this was the most potent 100 watts I have ever heard!!!
Then a single Ampzilla 2000 was running a 215 Sub.
This was all driven by a Krell Transport, into a Wadia DAC and then to an incredible TRInaural Processor.
I opened my briefcase and pulled out a few Refernce Cuts...Now to be perfectly frank it didn't have the sonic splendor I was expecting.
Something seemed a little off, but I didn't get a chance to feel out exactly what it was. Why? Because it was a steady stream of people coming in and sitting down and asking for certain cuts.
It was great.
Sat Morning I got there early, and did a little listening. Aha, the L&R leads were reversed. Now unless you are totally familiar with a musical piece, or you play some symphonic cuts and find the violins on the wrong side this is very easy to do.
I had James reverse the leads. Next I wanted to see what the Tri-Naural would do, but sitting in the sweet seat the soloist or center performer sounded too far away.
Got James to re-balance the channels a bit. This brought up the center a bit and
BAM!!! we had a seamless soundstage from wall to wall with the performer in the center no matter where you were in the room.
Then I notices just a "hint" of reflective glare from the amplifier bank (but only when sitting in a single chair sweet seat), so I placed a tube trap slightly out in the room to block the reflection.
Then I closed the drapes at the rear of the room completley closed to reduce reflections off the glass sliding door back there.
I opened the sliding glass door a bit to reduce some of the "pressurization" cause by the SIX 10" cones and TWO 15" Woofs and HOLY MOTHER OF ALL SOUND ROOMS!!!
It was assssssstounding.
I had picked up a copy of the USHER demo mix which happened to have a DRUM solo (which is rather famous and well known) which I had heard earlier on another system at my friend MAD DOg's suggestion.
Well I fired this cut up. AND I mean "fired". I was playing this with SOA LEDs lighting up much of the time.
I have never heard a drum sound so real. In the past I have heard some criticism of the "impact" and weight of drums when played on VMPS.
Well look out MaryBelle, those days are over. If I had hair it would have stood on end. From the metallic sheen of the cymbals, to the dry and powerful strikes to the snare and toms, to the thunderous and "knock you over and kick you in the gut" impact of the Kick Drum, this speaker is reincarnated.
Now in all fairness, I learned that BIG B, had once again donned his Sonic Sorcerer hat (like the one Mickey Mouse wears in Fantasia) and re-invented the Upper Bass Driver for the RM40. It was now a whole new ballgame, and it was absolutley incredible that all this "CLEAN, CLEAN", sound was being produced by 100 wpc!!!!
So from that moment on, I was confident that anyone I was able to demo to, was likely hearing the best sound at the Show.
In fact, I heard that comment time after time, as people arrived and left, and others who stopped back in, simply to say that they had heard system after system, and not one thing had the top to bottom that we had here.
Talk about warm cockles (OK don't get funny)
I'll post more later, but I would also like to thank all those who stopped in to say hi. It is really fun to put faces to the names and screen names.
To Chair Guy, Jon Gubman, and Blake, John Beavers, Mike Knapp, Noel, Romy the Cat (who did not insult me
but had some great music)Shaukat, Ranjit, Dave, Roger Gordon, Jason Moody and many, many, many others, thanks for stopping in.
And to be sure this is just an "off the top of my head" reccollection, and the actual list is 3-4 times this big of those of you from AC who stopped in and "confessed" to lurking and not posting.
I always like it when the eyes, look at the name tag, a smile breaks out and they always say the same thing "Oh you're on Audio Circle!!"
And this is not to mention the 200-300 people whom I didn't know, who stopped in and left with their ears well treated.
We did have some fun!!!
I also have some VMPS related comments about the TriNaural Processor coming up.
