Well, I loved it. My mate and I stayed over Sat in to Sun at the Future Inn and went to the show both days. Met some very interesting and knowledgeable/helpful people. The guy with glasses in the Technics room. Great guy.
Ok, some highlights from saturday were:
Ground floor; I think it was the second room that we went in to, we saw the line-up from Fine Audio (ex-Tannoy bods). The mid range and in particular the hi end (F1-10) looked incredible. Tested some headphones in the next room, with Audio-Technica winning for me. The MSR7's are amazing for the price, but their BT models were also very good. Hi-fi Racks beat Atacama on looks for me. As for the rest of the floor, Dynaudio had a great demo playing, I think it was The Special Forty(?) stand mounts. Sounded wonderful, but we later found out (on Sunday) that the hardware behind it was £40k's worth of Naim kit! No wonder it sounded good. Q Acoustics had their top of the range playing and yes, not to bad
Lower Ground Floor; Quad was meh(except their proto headphone - wonderful sound), as was B&W which surprised me. KEF had their wireless LS50's playing which were very good until we went next door in to the Naim/Focal room. Very impressed with this combo. Looked and sounded like a perfect match. I think the speakers were the Focal Kanta No.2. Didn't like the look and sound of the Technics gear, even though it was around £50k!
Terrace and Conservatory;
Now I love the design of Wilson Benesch speakers (far end on this floor), they were playing some bizarre music, no idea what it was. Anyway, the highlight was that we had a free desert with our lunch in the restaurant. Result! Lots of smaller sellers/magazines on this floor so not much interest for us.
Some highlights from Saturday were:
10th Floor; Leema Acoustics playing their new streaming products hooked up to ATC speakers. Very good, especially as they were receiving their stream from a few rooms away. No drop in strength that I noticed.
4th Floor; Even though I liked the sound of these next speakers, the look and name just killed it. There would be no way I'd have a pair of Von Gaylord's standmounts in my living room......Ophidian Audio were amazing for their size, but in the next Room, Canton just blew us away with their active bluetooth floorstanders. Just hook them up to your TV and off you go, virtual surround sound heaven with plenty of bass. Great demo. Apparently there'll be a standmount available by the end of the year.
Didn't like the look or sound of Mission. Elipson looked cool. I wasn't blown away with XTZ and their Cinema series, which is a shame as I was really looking forward to their demo. Admittedly it was a loop demo disc and not an actual film.
3rd Floor; AKG probably had the best closed back headphones at the show. You had to put the head phones on, press and hold a button for 5 or so seconds when it then beeped and this then meant that the headphones had auto calibrated the drivers to your ears or something. Did the test of before and after and we both could tell the difference for the better.....shame I didn't have £1399 burning a hole in my sky rocket. Fyne Audio demoed their flagship. I had brought along a couple of cd's, and Opeth - Windowpane has never sounded so good. Headroom and clarity like I've never heard before. REL looked nice but can't remember if they had a demo running. AE sounded good. I nearly ordered a pair of their stands. Big subwoofer fight out coming up, JL Audio vs SVS. Now then, SVS had an ATC speaker package compared to SVS having Ultras all round, but they both had their top end subs turned up to 11. For sound quality I'd give the nod to JL/ATC. Superb sound steering. But, for impact I'd go with SVS. They had a better film that was more suited to test the lower frequencies.
2nd Floor; Audioquest had one of the best demos. For some reason I get a little skeptical about the difference cables and noise conditioners can make, but that always changes when I go to the shows, and this was no different. Heard every change (subtle) that was made regarding power cables. Audioquest's problem was that their system on demo was REALLY good to start with. Kudos speakers but I can't remember the electronics. I think they played a track by Daft Punk and even though it's not my type of music it just sounded fantastic. Biggest change in the sound was from basic kettle leads to their NRG-2. Very impressed and will be buying 1 or 2......
1st Floor; ATC, again my cd that I'd brought along sounded stunning. Their speakers are worth the money imho, but......we moved along in to Spendor and WOW. Now I've never really given Spender the time of day for no other reason than I think they look, er, boring, but jeez arse the D9's are fantastic speakers. Headroom, Soundstage, clarity, bass, mids, highs. Lovely stuff. Another dance track but I didn't mind as the sound was.....music to my ears
Loved the high gloss slate grey finish too. £7500.....
PMC was...ok. Smaller floorstands on demo than previous years, and it didn't help coming from the Spender demo. Jeez that was good. The Bryston and AVM gear looked great though.
Another cable demo in Chord Company's room, and yet again I could hear every change that was made. Biggest difference was from Rumour to Shawline speaker cable and then the non-Teflon interconnect plugs to the Teflon versions. Great demo.
Dali was just ok, and I own Dali speakers myself. The wireless speakers they had on demo didn't compete with Canton for us.
So there we go, great show and will more than likely be back there next year., which will be 3 in a row, and I haven't done that for about 10 years now! It certainly helped staying overnight, which I'd never done before.
I'll add some pics tomorrow.
Ian.