Today, 04:47 AM
Mark EJ
Pinkfish media
We tend to go this show most years -- I find it mostly beneficial overall, and it's usually a good 'reset'. You get to hear what stuff other than your own sounds like.
Firstly, you get to hear stuff you could never possibly think of affording, and realise that it's mostly no better than what you've already got, although notable exceptions apply.
Secondly, you get to hear music that you'd never otherwise voluntarily listen to, which is occasionally very illuminating, but not all that often. The phenomenon of 'same old tracks in every room' seems to have gone, at least.
Thirdly, there is often magnificent unintentional comedy where you'd least expect it, such as when all the hardware from a particular manufacture is aggressively slim and ultra-miniature, but all the personnel from the same company are about 4 feet wide and clearly weigh over 20 stone.
The crux of it is that there's a stack of manufacturers all trying to get their stuff to sound at least vaguely acceptable under the worst possible conditions -- it is at least a level field. Seemingly, very few of them actually rise to the challenge, or it could be that they know better than I what the bulk of the public want when they spend, often, quite a lot of money on an audio system.
We didn't go into every room (by a long chalk), but both Spendor and Acoustic Energy somehow contrived to take some seemingly competent source components and combine them to produce boomy, flubby mush.
After this, Kudos gave some relief by at least providing some treble, making the port-chuffing less obvious, but it still didn't hang together properly.
Dali's room was interesting in that it sounded like an arbitrary mixture of the other two, but gave an arresting diversion in the form of one of their display-only speakers exposing its port to the room in a manner (and at a height from the floor) which appeared to invite the user to attempt congress with it. Whatever will they think of next, one wonders.
Naim's big Ovators seem to do everything more or less perfectly, but end up being mysteriously 'non-explicit' and ultimately non-engaging -- you just find yourself ignoring them, which is surprisingly easy to do and doesn't speak well of the various 'digital players' being demonstrated. There's 'effortless' (which is good), and there's 'making no bloody effort' (which isn't).
I had a similar problem with Rega's R10s (?), which apparently also use BMRs, but in their case added Spendor-style flub. Odd.
But PMC's oddly pissed-looking little boxes were utterly fantastic (ED: driven by Bryston electronics). It's incredible that they don't sound like a little speaker, but it's even more incredible that they also don't sound like a little speaker not sounding like a little speaker. Just satisfyingly precise, very fast and powerful and able to stop and turn on a sixpence. They're almost as nice as the fact.3s (at a third of the cost), and that's saying quite a lot
