I keep waiting to hear how the VMPS live vs recorded turned out.
The VMPS RM-50's are a mighty speaker indeed. We had the mid ribbons and tweeters on the Atma-Sphere MA-1 monoblocs and the bass on a pair of massive Classe monoblocs. Can't remember the exact model. All signal cables and power cords are from yours truly. Playing a wide variety of music was really fun and a unique experience. Not only was the sound extremely coherent across the entire frequency spectrum, there was also a very believable impact and presence on all the recordings played. I don't think that that level of performance is accessible for anywhere near even 3X or 4X the asking price of the components and speakers in the room at that time.
I thought that the Wavac room had sound that can compete but the preamp alone was $350K and the power amp was the smaller 120WPC single ended triode monos at a mere $180K for the pair. Easy to put together a $million+ system with that stuff.
Also the Precision Transducer Engineering room was a serious contender with their $49K powered reference monitor.
Not much else at THE Show was even in the same league.
Regarding the live vs recorded demo, Brian pulled it off very, very well. Not only was the sound exactly as performed but the locations of all the instruments was 100% accurate. As Brian has said, with a state of the art audio system it IS possible to exactly recreate the live experience. Thanks much to Navua and the other great musicians that contributed to the effort. If only Brian would refrain from personally doing a cymbal crash at the end of each song, that would help
In between Navua's performances, we did demos of the Bybee Music Rails installed in an MFA power amp on the mids and tweet of the RM-50's. The Bybee guys were able to easily remove and replace the filters in less than 30 seconds. The same cuts were played with and without. Without going into too many details. The difference was like a slap along side the head. Really obvious and a serious improvement for around $300!
