Clarysis comments on the other thread.
Also at show: Wolf Van Langen setup.
Talk about a mouth watering eye candy altar for old school tube-o-philes and vinyl lovers, this is it. There was even an exotic record weight that looked like Pasha’s crown, the thing musta been four or five inches high with girders and bearings and open spires and shiny bits. It didn’t fire lasers into the firmament, but I was expecting it at any moment.
This was a field coil designed speaker with a ‘full range’ cone and two large dipole woofers. Only vinyl was played when I was there but there was a DAC of some kind on static display. It’s the third field coil design I have ever heard.
What can I say, it sounded excellent. My planar ears detected a bit of resonance, as they usually do with non planar speakers, but that tends to go away after a bit.
My only surprise was it seemed kind of MVL system i.e. minimal volume level. Above that volume level, it was dynamically vibrant and excellent. Below that volume level, it faded a bit. At level, it would rip your wig with dynamics and really sounded good in a nearly horn-y way..
It also seemed that the volume level for the quiet bits needed to ramp up to the threshold. Of course, this was in a room with the air conditioning making some contributory noise. The integrated amp looked like 101D type DHT tubes driving Takatsuki 300b tubes.
DHT, vinyl heaven? It’s a good candidate. I didn’t even check out cost, I imagine it’s up there for this level of audio artistry and craft.
Sound Lab on first floor: I have always loved Sound Lab speakers at shows and this was no exception. Also the demo had the happiest speaker and setup wrangler ever, he was enjoying himself instead of looking like he could direct porcupine quills at anybody questioning his precious. He was funny and having fun, I guess like audiophiles should be doing.
I was nearly tilted over the edge when he played the vinyl of the Ormandy/PSO Beethoven Ninth chorale segment. It really sent me, but it usually does in just about any context. With the imaging, you could really envisage the chorale groups stacked to the rafters.
One odd observation was the narrowness of the sweet spot. One had to be very close to center to get the whole panorama rather than right or left weighted. However, it looked like a near field setup too close to the towers rather than a more appropriate distance, and the towers were toed in quite a bit.
I spent basically all of my time at these two and the Clarysis room.
