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Top audio 2016
Hi all
I visited today Top audio show, in Milan, Italy. Only stereo 2ch, not home-teather or video, pure music.
Melia hotel remembers me a lot the house of Scarface, a nice place, maybe the next time I will wear an Hawaiian shirt !:D
This is the summary of the best, in my opinion. The 2 girl were the best, nice, funny and good sounding speaker in the show! :D I never thought to find Acapella plasma tweeter, I spent more time in this room than anywhere else. BEAUTIFUL speaker, unfortunately they had a bad small room. Tannoy prestige, Mcintosh, and other good room. Maybe the king of all rooms was Kef, with some really expensive speaker
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WOW! Lots to see Stefano! I have no idea what some of the equipment was that was not marked clearly, but I've been out of it so long it doesn't matter. Some HUGE tubes, are those custom/proprietary?
So what was your favorite out of all this? What kind of musical material did they play? And are you telling me reel to reel is coming back!?!? There was some crazy looking turntable!
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Hi!
Unfortunately mee too, I'm not able to recognize all speakers and sources at first sight ;)
I havn't done research about big amp tube, and unfortunately I can't remember the label on glass, but imho they are normal tube
They played every kind of music, not only audiophile records, jazz and blues as usual. Old rock, as usual every room played also tracks cd of visitors, that increases the variety.
Reel to reel was only a short stall with service for tapes (maybe translation of music?), sale and repair. There are still alive a niche of people that still uses this kind of equipment but in normal show, I've seen many notebook as source, cdplayer and vinil
You're right, there was many good turntable.
One thing I noticed is that the aesthetic component of parts it's raised to its maximum. Design, good looking parts, but most often a beautiful shell...
My favourite...
1th place: Acapella Plasma unit, imho the bigwig, It sounds different from all the rest. I saw that flame was really tiny, purple-red flame (but horn is in polished brass, for sure that material gives a good warm color than cold aluminum), size in idle condition, as far I could see, is 5mm, no smell of ozone at all. Complete speaker in show is called Atlas, maybe 85k $ priced, due to small and ugly room, the bass and mid part didn't do a good job, for sure in a normal room this setup can do miracles. Source, amp and equipment were same level, imho top equipment in wrong room.
Hornspeaker System Acapella Apollon
2nd place: Tannoy Prestige, Nice looking and good sounding. Big room with some 20 people inside, high volume, sound live. Good attention to light detail and atmosphere, plus some artifice like tube traps, plus the floor was carpeted. optimal condition
Prestige Range
3rd place: Kef Muon, priced up to 150k $, maybe the best room in show, located in best spot. Tons of substance. Sound was really good, but if I have to be honest, I was not so impressed
KEF MUON - Flagship Hi-Fi Speakers - United States
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Thanks for all the pix and for your review.
Yup, one of the reasons I quit paying attention was too rich for my blood. $85k for a set of speakers? Interesting about the Acapella's. I don't know how to judge things when something is off. Like being in a bad room but sounding good?
I've only heard one set of Tannoy's and they were near field monitors for recording. I liked them, they were very neutral sounding which is very important for mixing. KEF's are a very interesting beast as the guy who put me on to the whole hifi thing back in the 70's idolized KEF's but I never got to hear them. A year or two ago I saw on the local Craigslist somebody had a pair of KEF's for sale for I think $700. They were HUGE, made in the 70's and had been in storage for a while. When I contacted them they said they were going over to show them to somebody else and I asked if they had checked the speaker surrounds and what kind of shape were they in? Either they got offended or sold them because I never heard back. The attitude seemed to be they were a bargain so shut up. There was no way to listen to them and I don't think I could buy them without listening first.
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Listening to the sellers of every room, no one was satisfied with the acoustics performance of room. Someone tried to put tube traps, other carpets and light panels with foam or wood to break waves.
Acapella room was maybe 3x4m, small, with bad shape and wooden floor. 12 chairs for people, speakers angulation was in my opinion too accentuated, maybe good only for central seats. I tried all position, it's curious that the strange mid horn sounded good in the worse place, at little more than a meter. Bass didn't impress me so much, a bit detached to double horn emission.
Ultimately, it would be nice to hear the system in a proper room, unfortunately there was no possibility
By the way, my focus was all concentrated on tweeter unit, for obvious reasons :D Cymbals and other highs were fantastic.
I found no noise with no signal applied, tiny idle flame, and not so much bigger in normal use. I read that starting frequency xover is 6khz, a bit high to see bigger white flame. I suspect that the trumpet is deep, with small diameter and tiny quartz cell, pretty efficient.
I hope I will fix my plasma soon, in order to discover at least the effective range and how it can sound.
I think you made the right decision, buying speaker with closed box can be really risky, unless the price is so low as to overshadow the rest :D
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The pix pretty much said it all, very small rooms. But when you think real world, how many have a real listening room? I guess those who have 85k to spend on speakers do, but not the rest of us. It was also interesting to see all the dramatic lighting etc. if you were truly going to have a level playing field you'd need that big ballroom or whatever the KEF was in and a rotating stage so you could have the other equipment set up while one was doing a set.
We all have our own focus. I hope you get your plasma tweeter squared away. I've been working slowly in steps at getting my stereo back together. One of the first steps was to find a suitable equipment cabinet and I finally found one in a local consignment store. It's an old Magnavox console that somebody gutted and made the speaker grills into reeded glass doors with adjustable glass shelves. Not too big, but big enough to have my turntable, pre, highs amp, lows amp, dbx 260 DriveRack speaker management and DVD player in it. This way I can bi amp my old ESS Tempests and tune the whole thing with the DriveRack along with SMAARTLIVE and see how that sounds. It might be too many processors in the link, but face it, home stereo is all a compromise anyway. :)
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I think you're right!
I hope you'll find all parts and time you need to setup your nice stereo!!
... i'm in bad situation with plasma, it seems possessed by devil :evil:. Strange things happen, I got a bad feeling about the quality of my new "matched quad" el34...
let's finger crossed!
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Have you ever gone into a big music instrument store like Guitar Center and gone into their electronics/recording area and listened to all the different near field monitors? It's truly an enlightening experience. I was gathering equipement and experience to be able to record the bands I was in and one of the major hunts was speakers. IMHO that's where the widest variation and a great deal of interpretation goes on.
The really cool thing about near fields are they are designed to listen close, like the next step away from headphones. The idea is to be able to have them on your mixing console ear level and close enough where the room is no longer a factor. I ended up with a set of TRM6 active monitors. They are the most detailed speakers outside of my ESS's I've heard. When we used these to mix to we ended up with the least messing around to get the recording to sound good on a boom box, car stereo, different home stereos, and in mono. I use them as my computer speakers as I no longer record.
All the real advancement in audio has been in live sound reinforcement. And having an old friend in the biz has kept me up with what is possible. That's why I've decided to at least try this style of home system I mentioned above because instead of griping about stuff like the hi end audio guys do and making excuses, these guys have the tools and equipment to fix any situation. So if you have good equipment and good signal, by analyzing and electronically fixing the ultimate sound as perceived by the listener, where the listener is I believe you might make a modest system sound as good and maybe better than a really expensive system with no ability to take the environment into consideration. We'll see :)
