Rocky Mt 2007: Boulder and Focal Team Up with Audio Unlimited
October 18th, 2007 — By editor
Jacob Heilbrunn
Boulder may have a reputation for a slightly sterile sound among some audiophiles, but there wasn’t a trace of it in Denver’s Audio Unlimited room.
Seldom have I heard such a smooth, natural sound.
This was the high-end at its best, demonstrating that sometimes high prices really do translate into splendid sound.
The $40,000 Focal loudspeaker sounded extraordinarily revealing and musical when playing an Ian Bostridge CD of Schubert Lieder. It left us—Jonathan Valin, Neil Gader, and me—agog.
Jonathan Valin
This was one of several ambitious rooms put together by mega-dealer Audio Unlimited of Denver and, in my opinion, it was far and away the best-sounding.
I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by how good the system turned out to be, since I don’t generally cotton to the larger Focal speakers or to Boulder electronics.
On the other hand, I love TARA Labs Omega cable and Zero interconnects (which are my references) and the Clearaudio Goldfinger v2 moving-coil cartridge (which, along with the Air Tight PC-1, is also one of my references), and have heard previous iterations of the Accuphase CD player sound mighty fine at other shows.
Here, everything was downright beautiful.
Oh, the overall sound was a little dark, I suppose, in a typical solid-state way, but timbres were still surpassingly lovely on both violin and piano in the Prokofiev First Violin Sonata LP [MusicMasters].
Ditto for Joanie’s voice and guitar on Joan Baez, Volume 2 [Vanguard] and for the entire Nationales Symphonie-Orchester des Polnishcen Rundfunks on the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra [EMI].
Although the orchestral strings were a little brighter than what I’m used to (that Focal inverted-dome beryllium tweeter?), bottom-octave pitch resolution was superb on all cuts, CD or LP. If nothing else, this system taught me a lesson about preconceived notions:
