Still-One
10-20-2010, 12:55 PM
The Show
I hope I do not ramble too much as I attempt to summarize my thoughts after spending the good part of three days roaming around RMAF ’10 in Denver. I have posted many of my photos in another thread here so this is more of a wrap-up plus a few general comments.
First, the show this year was really large. By my count there were about 170 rooms with gear and accessories. For those of you who have never attended, most of the larger rooms are located on the main floor or on the mezzanine level. The hotel has two towers. One tower had rooms set up on floors 2nd, 8th , 9th , 10th & 11th . The other tower had rooms on the 4th and 5th floors. Somehow I missed the 2nd floor altogether.
In general there was an open room on each side of rooms displaying gear so there was not a great deal of sound leaking from room to room as long as the doors were kept shut. Some rooms were very hot (Magico), some had no room treatments (Revel/Mark Levinson), some were over-treated (Kaiser/ Lessloss) and some were oddly treated (Hegel). Of course I would hope no one would make a purchasing decision based on just listening in this venue.
I arbitrarily skipped over some rooms when I saw product that did not interest me (tube gear or cables) or might be considered mainstream (Marantz) . That does not mean they did not sound good, just I did not have enough time. I did spend about 14 hours over the three days wandering the hotel. Some of the rooms were always crowded and if you did get a seat if probably was not going to be in the prime listening position.
One fun part is meeting the people who actually design some of this gear (Sanders and his speakers, Larry Walker and his tables, Nick Doshi and his gear) Fun people to talk to.
No show of this type is the best place for those of you who love vinyl playback. It takes too much time to set up a table properly and crowded and often noisy rooms are not optimum for showing of the nuance of vinyl. That said most of the demos used CD’s or server based playback. New CD players were pretty scarce too.
Final Thoughts and The Future
There is a lot of great gear out there and it is rather easy to put together systems that fulfill most of our needs. Surely there are differences in the sound amongst them but that doesn’t mean one has to be better than the next. It is a matter of individual preferences and those can change over time.
What is scary is the prices being asked for a lot of this gear. My system is not inexpensive by most accounts and I am sure that less than 3% of the country would consider spending those dollars on audio. Yet I saw room after room of gear from companies , some who I had never heard of, with prices significantly higher than what I spent. Who is really going to buy this stuff? Tube amps from Win Analog (who) for over $100K, ss amps from Technical Brain for ~$130k, Jones (who) amp for $25k, wonderful speakers from a two year old German company called Kaiser (who) for $64k, Critical Mass racks for $50k. Don’t forget the high price stuff from TAD, YG, Solution, Vitus, Mark Levinson’s and on and on.
Gear will continue to improve but the improvements and differences are becoming less important to me. I plan on looking for more new artists to keep my interest in this hobby going. I will continue to consider new products as they are released and I will continue to look for ways to tweak by system , but at these numbers I am off the Merry-Go-Round.
Jim
I hope I do not ramble too much as I attempt to summarize my thoughts after spending the good part of three days roaming around RMAF ’10 in Denver. I have posted many of my photos in another thread here so this is more of a wrap-up plus a few general comments.
First, the show this year was really large. By my count there were about 170 rooms with gear and accessories. For those of you who have never attended, most of the larger rooms are located on the main floor or on the mezzanine level. The hotel has two towers. One tower had rooms set up on floors 2nd, 8th , 9th , 10th & 11th . The other tower had rooms on the 4th and 5th floors. Somehow I missed the 2nd floor altogether.
In general there was an open room on each side of rooms displaying gear so there was not a great deal of sound leaking from room to room as long as the doors were kept shut. Some rooms were very hot (Magico), some had no room treatments (Revel/Mark Levinson), some were over-treated (Kaiser/ Lessloss) and some were oddly treated (Hegel). Of course I would hope no one would make a purchasing decision based on just listening in this venue.
I arbitrarily skipped over some rooms when I saw product that did not interest me (tube gear or cables) or might be considered mainstream (Marantz) . That does not mean they did not sound good, just I did not have enough time. I did spend about 14 hours over the three days wandering the hotel. Some of the rooms were always crowded and if you did get a seat if probably was not going to be in the prime listening position.
One fun part is meeting the people who actually design some of this gear (Sanders and his speakers, Larry Walker and his tables, Nick Doshi and his gear) Fun people to talk to.
No show of this type is the best place for those of you who love vinyl playback. It takes too much time to set up a table properly and crowded and often noisy rooms are not optimum for showing of the nuance of vinyl. That said most of the demos used CD’s or server based playback. New CD players were pretty scarce too.
Final Thoughts and The Future
There is a lot of great gear out there and it is rather easy to put together systems that fulfill most of our needs. Surely there are differences in the sound amongst them but that doesn’t mean one has to be better than the next. It is a matter of individual preferences and those can change over time.
What is scary is the prices being asked for a lot of this gear. My system is not inexpensive by most accounts and I am sure that less than 3% of the country would consider spending those dollars on audio. Yet I saw room after room of gear from companies , some who I had never heard of, with prices significantly higher than what I spent. Who is really going to buy this stuff? Tube amps from Win Analog (who) for over $100K, ss amps from Technical Brain for ~$130k, Jones (who) amp for $25k, wonderful speakers from a two year old German company called Kaiser (who) for $64k, Critical Mass racks for $50k. Don’t forget the high price stuff from TAD, YG, Solution, Vitus, Mark Levinson’s and on and on.
Gear will continue to improve but the improvements and differences are becoming less important to me. I plan on looking for more new artists to keep my interest in this hobby going. I will continue to consider new products as they are released and I will continue to look for ways to tweak by system , but at these numbers I am off the Merry-Go-Round.
Jim