RMAF 2019--PranaFidelity, Antipodes, Sound Conductors, Furutech

My latest show report from the 2019 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

T.H.E. Show 2019--PranaFidelity, Helius, E.A.R. and Furutech

My latest show report from T.H.E. Show in Long Beach is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This one is about a new brand--to me, anyway--PranaFidelity! You can read it here.

Down Under Audio Is All Set for the Newport Show!

We are all set and ready to go for Down Under Audio and the Newport Show! As I've mentioned repeatedly, we will be in Room 1011 and 1012 at the Hotel Irvine from June 3-5. In Room 1011 we will be featuring Axis and REDGUM Audio, and in Room 1012 we will have PureAudio, Brigadiers Audio, Furutech, The Wand and Les Davis Audio.

First up, we will feature PureAudio amplification from New Zealand. Gary Morrison will be there to introduce the the new version of the Duo stereo power amplifier. Gary has changed the design slightly so that this huge pure Class A amplifier runs cooler, and as a result of these mods he feels that the overall sound of the amp is sweeter than ever before. We will also have the Control preamplifier and the Vinyl phono preamplifier in the system.

The system will be fully wired with Furutech, including the Lineflux interconnects, Speakerflux speaker cables, Alpha power cords and the Furutech power conditioner.

Speakers, which I've mentioned, are the finalized versions of the Brigadiers Audio BA2 monitors. I had the honor of sitting with Brad Serhan, David Allen and Morris Swift of Brigadiers to finalize the design in Sydney, so I'm very proud of the result. Both Brad and Morris will be at the show to answer your questions.

Ian Robinson and Lindy Gerber of REDGUM Audio will be manning Room 1011 with the entire Black Series Line of integrated amplifiers including the RGi35ENR (65wpc), RGi60ENR (125wpc) and the RGi120ENR (175wpc). REDGUM manufacturers wonderful high-current amplifiers for hard-to-drive loudspeakers, but they will also be bringing one of their highly regarded CD players, the RGCD5ENR. Best of all, they will be giving away an RGi35ENR to a lucky attendee!

John Reilly of Axis VoiceBox won't be able to make the show, but his incredible little monitors will. They are the perfect sonic match for REDGUM and this will be the first time US audiophiles can hear the combination in all its glory--although Dan Muzquiz of Blackbird Audio Gallery has had both REDGUM and Axis available for demo for a few weeks.

Les Davis Audio's 3D² constrained layer dampers are now in production! We will be performing demonstration so that everyone can hear the sonic differences these affordable devices can make in almost any system! Les Davis himself will be there to show you how they work.

Simon Brown and his The Wand tonearm will make the trip from New Zealand as well. I can't wait to hear this tonearm--despite its modest price it features some truly amazing engineering and can be used with even the most impressive analog rigs!

Speaking of impressive analog rigs, we will be featuring the Audio Union Helix Turntable Designed By Mark Doehmann. I first auditioned this Aussie-designed 'table back in October at RMAF and I'm still haunted by the realistic sound and the incredible design. The Audio Union people demonstrated it for me--they shook the plinth while the record was playing and it didn't skip a beat!

Dan Muzquiz of Blackbird Audio Gallery will also be jumping back and forth between his room with Bob Clarke (Profundo) and these two rooms, and he'll answer any questions you have about auditioning these wonderful components here in the US.

So please stop by! We'll all be available to chat with you, and to listen to great tunes with some of the finest gear in the world.

CCI's Adventures at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show

Did I say "adventures"? To tell you the truth, it was a fairly quiet CES for Colleen Cardas Imports. My theory is that CES keeps getting larger and larger--as in number of square feet someone has to cover to see it all--yet attendance seems about the same. That makes it appear much quieter than it really was--everyone is too spread out. I said the same thing about the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest last October. These shows keep getting bigger and bigger, but the same number of people keep showing up year after year. It's not necessarily a bad thing. CES can be such a stressful show because it's a trade show that's not open to the public and everyone is there to do business. The 2014 CES, therefore, was mellow compared to years past. But I wouldn't mind seeing a little more excitement next year, when they start holding CES on the weekends once more. That's been one of the criticisms of CES during the last couple of years--they switched the show to mid-week and a lot of people can't get away from their day jobs.

Oh yeah...there was some bad weather that may have affected the 2014 CES. That "polar vortex" wound up delaying something like 18,000 flights the day before the show started, so a lot of exhibitors had to work through the night to get ready for day 1.

Despite all this, Colleen and I were very pleased with the way our system turned out. We debuted two new products in the Unison Research/Opera Loudspeakers/Furutech room: the new Unison Research Triode 25 amplifier ($3495) and the new Opera Quinta SE loudspeakers ($6995/pair). Our digital source was the Unison Research Unico CD player and all the cables and power management was by Furutech. It was another simple system that only took a couple of hours to set up correctly. Once we had everything hooked up and playing music, we were quite proud of the results. For about $15K without cables, the overall sound was quite amazing.

I know--I'm expected to say that. I'm a company man. But I love the way this system played tunes. The Quinta SEs go very deep in the bass, and although the Triode 25 only has 22wpc in triode mode, the bass filled the fairly large room with ease. I had the pleasure of breaking the system in for a couple of weeks prior to the show, and it was the system I installed back at home after we returned. The Quinta SEs, which were serial number 001, have already been sold but I get to listen to them for another month or so. These speakers make me have happy feelings.

So what is the Opera Quinta SE? First, its arrival was a bit of a surprise--we had no idea Opera was working on this model. It's basically an Opera Quinta--for all intents and purposes it looks the same--but it sports a new SEAS midrange/bass driver that's formed out of woven polypropylene. It looks a lot like a carbon fiber cone but it sounds smoother.

The Quinta SE, as you can see in this photo of the back panel, is ported. The regular Quinta has a sealed enclosure. The standard Quinta can reach down to 30 Hz, so the SE version may dig down and retrieve another couple of Hertz. After hearing deep bass on familiar recordings that I've never heard before, I'd say that spec is just about right.

The Unison Triode 25 integrated amplifier was also an unexpected treat. Unlike most Unison Research tube amps, which are mostly single-eneded parallel Class A designs, the Triode 25 is a push-pull Class AB design that can switch from triode (22epc) to pentode (45wpc) with a flick of the switch. First of all, I wound up leaving the 25 in triode mode for most of the show because it sounded so darned good that way. (Pentode mode allowed more extension at the frequency extremes, but it flattened out soundstage depth a little.) That said, the Triode 25 comes close to the sound of the S6--my personal favorite in the Unison Research line-up--for almost $2000 less. I really love this little amp and I'm planning on holding onto it for a while more as well.

Once again I have to make the excuse that I was stuck in my room for the entire show, so I didn't get out and listen to a lot of other gear. (I did venture into the Joseph Audio room a couple of times, which I'll report in the next blog entry.) But I did visit the T.H.E. Show at the Flamingo to check on another one of our brands--My Audio Design from the UK. Timothy Jung, founder and designer for MAD, was showing his gorgeous Grand MM monitor speakers ($8200/pair without stands) in a system that included Burmester and SOTA, and he was getting a powerful, authoritative sound out of his fairly large stand-mounted monitors. At one point Timothy really cranked up the volume on the system and my head started to spin, but the MMs didn't fail to reproduce the accurate sound levels of a live rock performance. I'm just getting old.

Last year I reported on one of my pet peeves at trade shows--fear of sitting in the "sweet spot" chair in order to appear polite. At this CES I found something new to grumble about. Here's the scenario: a person walks into the room saddled with all sorts of photographic equipment--tripods, cameras, maybe even an assistant. They snap a few quick photographs and then quickly exit a room. Okay, that's not so strange considering all of the international press that covers CES. But at this CES, it happened every few minutes all day long for the entire show. None of these people asked questions about the equipment they were shooting. They didn't stop for a second to listen to the music. These people were on a mission--to photograph EVERYTHING at CES.

Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me, but I'm seeing a trend on audio discussion forums. Someone will mention a particular trade show, and then someone else will say, "Hey, let me post some of my pics from the rooms at the show!" Then that person posts page after page of photos of all the gear. On one forum I saw a guy post forty-eight pages of photos. Of course the other posters would ask questions like "Wow, those Magico speakers look amazing! How did they sound?" Unfortunately, the shutterbug doesn't have a clue and made some sort of lame excuse for not offering an opinion on the sound quality. This person doesn't remember because this person wasn't listening.

To all the shutterbugs, I must say that you're doing it wrong. Sure this gear is beautiful and it deserves to be photographed. But your hi-rez digital photography only scratches the surface. Set your camera down for a minute and listen for a change. You'll have more fun.

CCI at the Newport Beach T.H.E. Show 2013

"I bet you thought you were coming to Newport Beach."

That was sort of the running joke at this year's T.H.E. Show, which has been dubbed "the Newport Beach show" for some time--despite the fact that it's not actually held in Newport Beach. It's actually held at the Hilton and Atrium hotels near John Wayne Airport, whioh means they're actually in Costa Mesa...or Santa Ana, or Irvine. You know, the place where all those cities congeal. I was born and raised in Orange County, so I know the Newport Beach show isn't actually in Newport Beach, but nevertheless many show attendees and exhibitors seemed a bit distressed when they looked out the windows of their show rooms and saw no ocean, no port and no beach.

This was the third annual T.H.E. Show in Newport. Colleen and I missed the first two--we just couldn't fit the show into our schedules in 2011 and 2012. We were told repeatedly that we had made a horrible mistake because the first two shows were reportedly well-attended and lots of fun. Maybe the bloom has come off the rose this year, but the show was merely good--no different than any other show we've attended this year (and we've done five in the first five months of 2013).

The pros of the show were great weather, of course, and well-mannered and well-informed attendees. (On that note, I don't think I've seen so many German cars or Reyn Spooner shirts in one place in all my life.) I also enjoyed the cigar booth in the lobby, and the fact that I could enjoy one of those cigars out by the swimming pool.



The cons, however, centered around the exhibit rooms at the Hilton, where CCI was located. There were no power outlets near the front of the room, where the system needed to be set-up--hence the strange equipment rack configuration you see in these photos. In addition, the floors of the room tended to be either concave or convex, which meant that even when my bird's-eye level said my speakers were sitting flat, my eye-crometer told me that they were actually tilting toward each other. Finally, the rooms were NOISY. The halls were NOISY. The AC unit in the room was NOISY. The walls between the rooms were obviously thin, which meant it was very difficult to audition our equipment in a reasonably quiet environment. We spent most of the show competing with the PBN room across the hall, and those speakers were almost seven feet tall. In other words, we lost that battle.

In the Atrium, where our partner Dan Muzquiz of Blackbird Audio Gallery and our friend Bob Clarke of Profundo were exhibiting new products from Heed, Trenner & Friedl, Viva, Transfiguration, Basis and Cardas Audio, they fared a bit better. The power outlets were located all over the room, the proportions of the room were more complementary to a sound system--despite floors that were far more lumpy and uneven. If we come back next year, I want to be at the Atrium.



Here's a shot of our basic system. We used the Unison Research Giro turntable with arm and UN1 cartridge ($3995 complete), PureAudio Vinyl phono preamplifier ($4500), Unison Research Unico CDE CD player ($4120), Unison Research Sinfonia integrated amplifier ($6495) and the Opera Seconda loudspeakers ($3995/pair). All cabling and power management was from Furutech of Japan. Those of you who read this blog regularly or know me from Facebook have probably already recognized this system as my own. Yup, that's right--that's pretty much what I've had in my listening room over the last year. I do rotate the Trenner & Friedl ART monitors and the My Audio Design Grand MS speakers whenever I can, and the PureAudio Vinyl preamplifiers tend to get sold as soon as they arrive which means I have to use my back-up Lehmann Audio Black Cube SE more than I'd like (it's a wonderful $1000 phono pre but it's NOT the PureAudio). But when it comes to the turntable, arm, cartridge, CD player and amp, those are my daily drivers. And they sounded very nice at the show.



Here's a shot of the Secondas. People at the show dug them in white. Of the four finishes Opera provides (black, white, cherry and mahogany), white used to be ranked choice #4. In the last couple of years, it's now #2. White audio components are HUGE in Europe right now, and getting bigger in Asia. It's getting more and more popular in the USA lately as well.



Here's a pic of the system I stole from Dan Muzquiz. Here you can see the strange set-up, which did prompt some queries from the attendies. We tried to put everything along the side wall, where the power outlets were located, but it sounded terrible. So what you're seeing is the result of power cords being stretched out as far as they would reach so the speakers could fire out from the front wall. I was typically unhappy with the sound on set-up day, but by the time the first attendee walked through our door, the sound was much closer to what I experience every day in my listening room.



Here's a close-up of the Furutech power filter and the power cords. Man, this is gorgeous stuff--beautifully constructed, classy looks and great sound. Most of it was hidden behind the rack in the corner, which was a shame--these cables deserve to be front and center. When Peter Breuninger of A/V Showrooms came into our room to shoot a video, I almost forgot to mention Furutech. When the video is posted, you can hear me scrambling to mention Furutech before he leaves the room.



Colleen and I were trapped in the room for almost all three days. Dan Muzquiz did relieve us for an hour or two, but for the most part I saw very little in other rooms. Fortunately, everyone seemed to come and visit us--including Mat Weisfield of VPI. He was carrying around the revolutionary new VPI 3D tonearm which has been created out of epoxy by a 3D printer. The photo above is of Colleen and Mat, sharing the 3D love. I talked to Mat briefly about a future interview for my Vinyl Anachronist column in Perfect Sound Forever, and he's up for it!



At every trade show, John Atkinson from Stereophile always stops by on the last day about 15 minutes before the show ends. This year he came about three hours early, catching us off-guard. On the first day of the show Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds dropped off some test pressings of new releases, and I spent a big chunk of the show playing Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Tin Pan Alley." That's what we played for JA, and I'm pretty sure he dug it--his head and body were swaying from side to side. JA currently has the PureAudio Control preamp and Reference monoblock power amps for review, so he enjoyed a chance to listen to the matching Vinyl phono preamp.

By the way, that's Dave Neilson to JA's left. Dave was one of the two guys who started Splintr Designs, makers of the wonderful Trellis equipment racks we've used at the last few shows. Dave has started a new audio furniture company, Audio Strata, and we hope to use his beautiful new products at the upcoming Rocky Mountain Audio Show and at CES 2014. The new racks are quite a bit more advanced than the Trellis racks, using new composite materials.



Finally, I'll wrap it all up with a photo of the PBN Groovemaster turntable from across the hall. These guys offered amazing sound all during the show--even from across the hall. We kidded them a lot about their volume levels, but they had a huge system and they needed to show it off. I spoke with PBN's founder and designer, Peter B. Noerbaek, and he's designed one hell of a beautiful turntable--which sounds great as well.

I'll have a part two to this report in a day or two, where I'll cover the happenings at the Blackbird Audio/Profundo rooms. Lots of good stuff over there, including an amazing new speaker from Trenner & Friedl!