Preview: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, Part 2

Mile-High Audio

Coming Soon: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2009—October, 2-4, 2009

Each Fall, music lovers and audiophiles of all stripes convene in Denver, CO for what has become an annual must-see/must-hear event: The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest.

To provide a preview for  RMAF 2009, AVguide.com is posting The Absolute Sound’s report from the 2008 Fest,--a report that was originally published in The Absolute Sound issue 190 and was presented in four parts.

This post presents Part 2 of the report, by Steven Stone. Watch for Parts 3 and 4 to be posted tomorrow.

Enjoy, and please do join in us in Denver for RMAF 2009. --Chris Martens

__________

Mile-High Music

Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2008

Steven Stone on Next-Gen Digital and Stand-Mounted Speakers

What a difference a year makes.

In prior years RMAF exhibitors seemed more concerned with looking backward than forward. Turntables, tube electronics, and large-footprint horn speakers predominated. So strong was this feeling of déjà vu that I dubbed RMAF the “anachrophile show.” Exhibits seemed to be stuck in the “good old days” before digital, solid-state devices, and speakers with closed cabinets.

RMAF surprised me by discovering digital in a big way. It was as if Rip Van Winkle woke up from his long sleep and morphed into a skateboarding Net 2.0 digital nerd. Compared with last year, where the phrase “music server” was more likely to be heard in the hotel restaurant than in show hallways, at least 25% of the rooms I visited had some form of network-capable digital music device. The show book even marked all the rooms that had a Wadia i170 iPod dock with a bright red star so the i-Pod-carrying legions could descend en masse! For the first time I felt like I was attending a show occurring in the 21st rather than the 20th century.

Are You Being Served?

Judging by the number of Slim DevicesSqueezebox music servers I saw in exhibit rooms, you might think that the Slim Devices units were the only servers worthy of high-end use. I suspect the Squeezebox proliferation owed much to its reasonable price point and its display—every audiophile loves to look at VU meters. Although the Slim Devices Squeezebox, Duet, and Transporter are totally trick, I did notice other music servers also strutting their stuff. Both the Listen Up rooms and Signal Path Deco rooms featured new SonosZP-90 players. The Deco even has a hollow that let’s you tuck away the Sonos so only you will know it’s there. Sooloos, Qsonix, and Kalaidascape were present as well, but none of these servers had any new features or specifications for RMAF.

A new company, Digital Science, displayed its Music Vault product. It consists of a nice large NAS (Network Assessable Storage) hard-drive with a CD-ROM drive. The Music Vault allows you to burn CDs directly into a music library. It comes bundled with Slim Devices Squeeze Center software so you can run a Squeeze Box, Duet, or Transporter without a computer. The Music Vault should also work with Sonos, but it has not been fully tested with a Sonos system. Starting at $1485 for the MusicVault 500, which will hold 1800 CDs in lossless FLAC file format, and topping out with the $2265 MusicVault 2000 which holds 7200 CDs, the MusicVault offers a clever way to burn, store, and access your entire digital music library. For more information go to its Web site at soundsciencecat.com where you can even download the owner’s manual.