My take on the demo:
The difference between what I heard at the beginning and at the end of the presentation was enormous, to the point of dismissing speakers as poor performers at the beginning and considering them absolutely top performers at the end, worth every penny.
Having said that, the entire presentation was cleverly designed, quite suggestive and with some deceptions along the way. There was a mix of tweaks that certainly do work and produce improvements in presentation that can be observed by many and repeated in a controlled fashion and tweaks that are more or less based on deceptive presentation and are pretty much hoax IMO.
For example, it was clear that initially speakers were positioned intentionally into the worst possible spot in the room so that it could be demonstrated how repositioning of speakers for not more than 1” can result in tremendous improvement. Nothing new here, it is well established fact, but cleverly used in a mix with some very questionable parts of presentation.
Then the initial location of electronics, placed on extremely resonant metal rack located in the room corner where strong resonance was to be expected, all with objective to demonstrate miraculous and quite expensive support products that take care of resonance issues.
The point is that very few people would have such poor setup to begin with, yet the presentation used the worst possible scenarios to present products’ effectiveness.
Then the grounding gizmo, a wooden box with some kind of soil in it, a clever bit that was based on known benefits of sound grounding schemes, which had nothing to do with the box, in other words one can accomplish proper grounding without dishing out big $ for the gizmo.
Then there were panels. Of course they will make absolutely tremendous difference, which was clearly heard. But one has to put everything into the right perspective, is your listening room a basement with bare concrete walls and no treatment of any kind? If yes then you will experience tremendous improvement by spending $1000 per panel, if no then you may spend $ for almost nothing. For example I have a room with no corners of hard reflective surface, tube traps do not make any difference for me, no matter where I position them, period.
And so on. That was a clever mixture of smart and well established “tweaks” and some hot air in an effort to introduce a number of products.
The end result was of course very fascinating, the cumulative changes (those that actually make the positive difference) made everyone witness speakers’ transformation from a typical poor performer in a terrible hotel room to absolutely superb reproducer of recorded material, and that was by far the best performance I have heard at the show and among the best ever.
But of course I am not going to run and spend $ on those racks or grounding box. Panels maybe. And speakers quite possibly, once I confirm in a more controllable manner that they are really as exceptional as my first impression, I am already looking to arrange an audition.
