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CA Audio Show at the Oakland Airport Hilton - Last Day - long (and stream of consciousness!)

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on July 30, 2017 at 20:21:12

It turns out that the final day was much more eventful than I thought it would be. I started by attending the open discussion with XLO Electric founder Roger Skoff and celebrated designer John Curl. Usually these types of events are presented with the "celebrities" up on stage and the listeners down at floor level. But for this one, everyone was seated in a circle (more or less) at floor level to facilitate discussion. Subjects ranged from the high price of entry into the audiophile world, to the future of high end audio. Roger Skoff did most of the talking, and I wish he had deferred more to John. Nevertheless, Skoff had some interesting ideas. On the problem of how to get non-geezers interested in audio, he made the point that, for the most part, the finest sound that most millennials have heard is at their local movie complex. He suggested that, in order to get them to appreciate audio, people with home theater set-ups should invite their millennial friends over and play a big budget movie, and, at one of the climactic parts, cut the sound to the home theater system and just let it play through the tinny speakers built in to the system's big-screen TV. Roger concluded, "THAT will teach them the value of a high-quality sound system!". I couldn't contain myself, so I dared to amend his statement to, "That will teach them the value of a high-quality SURROUND sound system!". At that point, John Curl perked up and said (pretty enthusiastically I thought), "Yes! Surround sound can be VERY VERY good!". So I got some brownie points from John Curl himself - LOL! I still wish Roger would have let John do more talking.

From there I went to the main exhibit rooms, most of which I'd seen already. So I was walking down the hallway, just listening to what was coming out of each room - mostly "little girl with guitar" or Brubeck "Take 5" type offerings - but, finally, at the end of the hallway, what should I hear but the strains of the Kyrie from Haydn's Nelson Mass! I had to investigate! It was from the Acapella room with the $55,000 spherical-horn ion-tweeter speakers I've already posted about. If anything, the system was sounding even better than it had the previous couple of days (possibly because of more break-in time? who knows?). Once again, I did not recognize whose performance it was (non-HIP BTW, except for the boy choral trebles and altos!), so I asked the presenter, Neli Davis, which recording it was. It turned out to be the old Willcocks/King's College recording. Another nice thing about this room was that they allowed "requests", i.e., you could bring in your own CD's and they would play your selected track over their system. So after we'd gotten a certain way into the Gloria, Neli stopped the Haydn because other listeners had come in with various CD's of their own which they wanted to hear - mostly electronica, industrial, etc.


Same picture as yesterday - the Acapella "High Cellini" speakers

I left at that point and went into another room which Ivan303 and I had previously visited but which I didn't post about yesterday. This room featured the Zu Audio Druid Mk6 Speakers and Pass Laboratories XA30.8 power amplifier. We had heard an orchestral version of the Prelude to Albeniz' "Cantos de Espana", which I thought sounded clean and dynamic, with a lot of good "snap" to the sound. But when I walked in today, the room was empty, except for one person listening - it was Cookie. We smiled pleasantly at each other, but I was on my guard in case she tried to corner me and give me a harangue about the virtues of DSD! ;-)

Good sound from these guys, but I thought they were spaced too far apart! And, no, that's not Cookie - she'd left by the time I took the picture

At this point, I realized I'd brought my own CD (actually SACD) and I hadn't remembered to request a play back at the Acapella room. I've posted about this album before: the Violin Concerto and the Turksib Symphony by Maximilian Steinberg, the son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov.



So I returned and gave my CD to Neli, who placed it in queue. Before she played it, she announced to the folks seated there that she was very interested in this recording, because she was not familiar with Steinberg. Someone from the back volunteered, "Oh - Steinberg! Yeah - he conducted a lot of good recordings. I didn't know he was a composer too!". "Different Steinberg" I replied. ;-) My biggest fear was that this music, which is somewhat esoteric and definitely unfamiliar to people, would quickly empty the room, and I would have to apologize to Neli for indulging my odd tastes. But no - the opposite happened! More people started coming into the room, including a couple of younger guys with their babe girlfriends. I was still worried, and, at the five-minute mark, I let Neli know that she could stop the music and go on to someone else's track if she wanted to. "Oh? Do you have to be somewhere soon?", she asked. I replied that I didn't, so she said we should hear more - all the way to the end of the symphony in fact. And even more amazing, the other folks in the room stayed through two tracks worth of the symphony (15 minutes) to the very end. Even though the work is unfamiliar, it is definitely approachable and is also colorfully scored, with interesting contrasts among the sections of the orchestra (one would expect no less from the son-in-law of Rimsky Korsakov!) and much use of percussion. So in this sense, it IS entertaining, even if you don't know it already. At the end, when Neli was removing the disc from the player, she commented about what a wonderful discovery this music was. And when she returned the disc to me, she reiterated how much she liked the tracks she heard, and let me know that she had copied down all the information about the disc so that she could order a copy for herself! Best possible outcome! ;-)

My final stop was the AudioNote room, which Ivan303 had recommended earlier today. Just as I walked in, the presenter (sorry, I didn't get his name) was asking the listeners which type of music they wanted to hear. "What classical do you have?", I asked. "What period?", he answered. "Late 19th, early 20th century?", I responded. "Well," he said, "I don't trust any composer born after 1685, so why don't we listen to E. Power Biggs play some Bach organ music?". That was OK with everybody (including me), although he did apologize that this was a Columbia recording - LOL! Anyway, this was an ordeal by vinyl, so the usual incantations had to be invoked before the famous D-minor Toccata and Fugue began. This is the recording that was made in St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig, and actually, it sounded pretty good to me, until about midway through the fugue. . . pop. . . Pop. . . POP. . . PPOPP!!! And then it happened, the stylus was skipping back to the same groove over and over. This forced a sudden halt to the music and general embarrassment all around. "Ah! Vinyl!", I said in my most sneering voice! But a few minutes later, after the musical selection had been changed to a duet between Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, someone else walked into the room and exclaimed, "Oh! Wonderful! Tubes! Vinyl! None of that digital stuff that doesn't sound like real music!". I was on my way out anyway! ;-)

The Audio Note UK room - They would have been better off if they had used the RTR recordings when I was there!

On the way down the elevator, I met the father of one of the violinists I've been accompanying this year. It was a nice surprise for us to discover that the other also lived a secret life as an audiophile! ;-)

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The Cable Cooker

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