Paragon's Analog Night

[Still-One]

Tonight several of us Aficionado's will be attending Paragon Sight & Sounds -Analog Event. This is one event if their annual Fall Music Series.

Representatives will be present from Brinkmann Audio, Dan D'Agostino, Doshi Audio, and Transparent Audio.

Special guests (reviewers): Michael Fremer and Myles Astor

As I understand they will have simultaneous demonstrations running in several rooms.

Evening Program:
Dan D'Agostino, premiering the new! Momentum Phono Preamplifier.
Nick Doshi, demonstrating Open Reel Tape playback through his V3.0 Tape Stage.
Josh Clark, presenting the new! Transparent Opus power cord.
Andrea Brinkmann, explaining the Brinkmann turntable design philosophy.
Michael Fremer of Stereophile, discussing the finer details of turntable set-up.
Myles Astor of AVShowrooms.com, exploring all things analog including reel-to-reel tapes.

[KMC45]

How was it?

[Catcher10]

Interested to read about what Nick Doshi did.....

[Still-One]

Originally Posted by KMC45

How was it?

Sorry it took so long to respond. Saturdays in the fall for me are focused on college football. No time for audio.

The event Friday evening was very good. It turned out there were three rooms to cycle through. I will touch on each room in the order I sat through the presentations.

First up was Myles tape demo. The gear in that room was all Nick Doshi 3.0 including one of his tape stages handling the duty for the 15ips tape machine. Speakers were Wilson Alexia's. Myles began his demo with a Powerpoint presentation touching on the current state of tape in hi-end audio. He then played several tracks from various tapes. What surprised several of us was how quiet these tapes were, no tape hiss could be heard on the majority of the tracks he used. As one would expect the SQ from tape was exemplary. My issues are content, price and user issues. (track access, short playing time, pre and post listening handling issues) I am sure that for many here those are non-issues. Great job Myles. I came out of that demo smiling.

The second demo I attended was by Josh Clark of Transparent Audio. Before A/B 'ing the new Opus Power Cords versus their previous top of the line Powerlink MM2x Josh spent time covering the changes in wire, network box, and connectors that went into the cords. The gear used in this demo was McIntosh 601's, the new C-1100 pre-amp, Sonus Faber Lilium's with the new dCs Rossini cd/DAC. Speaker Cables and interconnects were Ref Gen 5. For the demo they played parts of a track a couple of times before swapping just the 601's pc's from MM2x to Opus. Everyone in the demo I sat through could readily hear the improvement with the Opus.

The main room was the last I one I cycled through. This room was Dan D'Agostino's Momentum mono blocks, his pre-amp and him discussing his new 3 piece phono stage. Andrea Brinkmann's showed off top of the line turntable. Speakers were Wilson XLF's (not sure if the two Thors Hammers were in or out of the picture) with Opus Magnum SC, and the amps were connected to the Meletsky StroMtank battery power unit. Michael Fremer selected and discussed the vinyl used for the demo. I stayed for about half of this demo as I had no interest in the music selections.

It was a lot of fun

[KMC45]

Thank you

[tweet]

Jim,
You're fortunate to live near Paragon and have the opportunity to experience the events there. Sounds like another fun and educational night of audio.