Preview: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, Part 3

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 3 of the report, by Neil Gader.

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

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Mile-High Music

Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2008

Neil Gader on Electronics and Floorstanding Speakers

My beat was the under-$10,000 segment of audio with special consideration given to recent electronics and floorstanding loudspeaker developments. Here are my room-by-room snapshots.

Floorstanding Standouts and More

Allen Perkins announced that speaker company Sonics, a company he owns in partnership with former Audio Physic designer Joachim Gerhard, has moved its final assembly and QC facility to Berkeley, California—the home of Perkins’ Immedia Sound. Their first jointly conceived model is the $5500 Amerigo, a wonderfully well-balanced three-way reflex design that had seamless driver integration. Immedia’s Spiral Groove line of electronics was also on display, including the new DP1 linestage preamp, whose chassis is milled from a single billet of aluminum. The matching E60 is a dual-mono 60Wpc pure Class A amplifier. Even with eight MOSFET output devices per channel and Class A operation, the E60 ran surprisingly cool by virtue of an ultra-quiet internal fan and sophisticated dual heat sinks. The DP1 and E60 are priced at $15,000 each. Look for Spiral Groove’s new phonostage in January.

High-end importer and distributor Dan Meinwald always manages to get great sound regardless of show conditions, and this year his setup of E.A.R. Electronics and Marten loudspeakers followed that tradition. With a diagonal positioning of the Swedish-built Marten FormFloor speakers, the system sounded wonderful. The $6500 FormFloor is a three-sided slender tower with a ceramic woofer and ribbon tweeter. Add the matching FormSub (10" woofer with 400W Class D amp) and the total price comes in at a not unreasonable $11k. And no wonder they sounded so clean and transparent—they were being driven effortlessly by E.A.R.’s 890 70Wpc amp ($7300), Acute CD player ($5900), and 868 preamp ($5300 or $6900 with phono). I later ran across E.A.R. designer Tim DeParvacini who confirmed that he was working on a USB DAC for introduction at the 2009 CES.