Best and Worst sound at the CES Show 2004

as an owner, take my comment w/ a grain of salt.

i've owned merlins, soundlabs, and wilsons.

i've heard rockports (older models), wisdoms, accapellas, maggies, vandys, sonus fabers, thiels, etc etc.

set up properly (as mine are), there's nothing i'd take over the wilsons. their only fault is that they're expensive. (and the impedance is a bit too low IMO in the mid-low bass).

so, don't blame wilson. blame the person setting up the room. (and yes, my wilsons sounded like dogfarts until i got them dialed in).

rhyno

I wasn't at CES 2004, but I can comment on this years show.

I walked into the Wavac room, listened for maybe one minute and hit the bricks. It wasn't worth sitting through. I heard better sound in rooms with $5000 amps.

Best sound of the show was in the VTL room. I have never spent much time with VTL, so I had never formed an opinion one way or another, and I've certainly never seen the big Wilson's where I live, but the system stopped me in my tracks. I thought I would just take a quick peek, and ended up sitting for quite a while. The system was open dynamic without being overly detailed and unmusical. I could have spent a lot of time there, but there was simply too much to see and hear!!!

The Purist room was in 'my' top three, they showed their Venustus cables with a Nagra pre-amp, and a Swedish (?) amp and CDP that I had never heard of, but they did a good job. Another winner was the Star Sound Technologies room. They were showing a new pair of monitors with their own monoblocks, rack, and points, with some dcs electronics. My goodness that little system sounded good!!! The speakers with stands are only $5000 and roll off above 35Hz, but in their room there was not an obvious lack of bass. Virtual Dynamics was worth stopping in. Rick was a lot of fun to talk to, a man of integrity in a world of charletans (that doesn't look right, where's the spell check option???).

There was a big electronics company that had an active speaker setup there which I REALLY wanted to see, and hear. I was very disappointed. In the room they sounded poor, which is not to say they are not a great speaker.

People who go to the show and really condemn a manufacturer or product for sounding terrible are being disingenuous. The best rooms suck, and none of us would buy a house that offered nothing better than the tiny rooms in which these systems are shown. There were obvious attempts to tame the rooms, which worked to a certain degree, but the manufacturers I talked to told me that this is not as much a time to strut their stuff as a time to meet people, and shake some hands. Deals are made by building understandings/relationships between retailers and manufacturers.

Who buys a product based on how it sounded in the store??? What retailer would buy a product based on how it sounded at CES or THE Show???

I had a great time, listened to some great systems, and some of them even sounded good!

I believe there are enough great sounding products to be concentrating on the "worst".
Why not reporting on the positive stuff? Will report my thoughts when I have more time.

I really liked the Vandersteen/Joule room a lot. To me, easily best of show.

That said, I'm not a Vandersteen fan. Go figure :)

Many of my friends like the ARC/Wilson room the best.

There were 3 rooms that really impressed me.
There was a new company, April Electronics, with several product lines (Oasis, Eximus, Stello)of amps, dacs, cd players. Their products were featured in the Dali and Metal Sound Design rooms, both of which had very rich, detailed, and exciting yet non-fatiguing sound.
Audiopax' room had a sound that combined the best of solid state with the best of tube sound; detailed, musical, reasonably deep and tight bass.
Audio Aero's booth had a sound that really made you forget about the equipment, and listen to the music - rich, detailed, non-fatiguing. Bass transients were very soft,though, although sustained notes went very deep, and bowed bass notes had an appropriate level of vibrance. Synthesized bass didn't have the excitement factor of a good solid state system. If I didn't think about it, I didn't bother me, but on recordings that I knew had serious bottom-end oomph, it never materialized.
I was quite disappointed in the Rowland / Rockport room. The system really spotlighted the upper midrange, resulting in a very fatiguing sound. This was surprising, due to all the very positive press given to the ICE amps here recently, and the raves from the big mags over Rockport's speakers.
Vmps was also disappointing, as they often like to tout their best-of-show votes in their advertising. The system was very boomy. I understand VMPS has a way to adjust the boom factor, but it sounded like they didn't bother.