Impressions Of A 47 Year-Old A/V Show Virgin

I went to the Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show (TAVES) over the weekend.  It was my first experience of a show like this, probably the kind of thing all too familiar to most of you:  Major downtown hotel, various stereo setups in cleared-out suites, a main floor area with lots of vendors.  I work in television and stare at video monitors all day long so I ignored the video half of the show and spent 3+ hours exploring what I truly love, high end audio.  Or I thought I loved it.  I’d never really been exposed to so much in one place at one time.  Here are my thoughts on the experience, and some of what I saw at TAVES 2014.

I think I know good sound when I hear it.  I listen to professionally tracked audio each day at work, have a decent home stereo system (Lossless files>Digital room EQ>Peachtree amp>Totem speakers>acoustically tweaked room) and have run a home recording facility for a long time.  My current studio:



When I first arrived at the TAVES show, I explored the dozens of speaker systems set up in emptied out hotel rooms.  Almost none of the vendors showcasing their high end gear bothered to set up any room treatment.  Most of the systems, regardless of cost, sounded marginal to terrible.  I was frankly pretty shocked.  Who’s dropping $50,000 on a system after hearing it in these conditions? 



There were a few exceptions, mostly smaller systems that didn’t overwhelm the room and where the vendor at least had heavy curtains to work with.  This was the best sounding setup I heard.  Speakers from Neat Acoustics driven by Naim components.



I then went in search of what I was really there to hear:  Headphone gear!  Some of the hotel suites had headphone stuff in them.  Sony had a room:



So did Woo audio.  Nothing I heard in the Woo room sounded good and I suspect it was the source material they chose to feed all their displays.  Again, boggled.





These sounded pretty good, though. Found them in a room mixed in with Harbeth speakers. Phones from a new company out of New York called Master & Dynamic.  Really comfortable, warm, balanced sound.  Model MH40, $500:



On the main show floor, an entire hall was dedicated to headphones.  Grado, Oppo, Stax, HiFiMan, Audeze, Sennheiser, etc.  All the good stuff you guys talk about.



I brought along my Leckerton portable and lossles s music and have to say that most of the phones I plugged in sounded pretty good.  Except for the Grados.  Didn’t like them much.  I got to hear Stax for the first time.  I think they had the entire lineup there.  The sales guy started me on their entry level set.  Nice.  Airy, neutral, detailed, as far as I could tell in a noisy room.  I went straight for the 009’s next for comparison, and this is where my most important lesson of the day crystallized.



Stax was piping their own selected tracks into the phones.  The recording I heard on their entry level rig was good.  When I moved over to the 009's, a different, poorer quality track was playing.  It made the 009’s seem unimpressive.  So this was my big lesson of the day:  Beyond a certain hardware price/capability point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in hard and the quality of the recording (and room acoustics in the case of speaker systems) becomes FAR more important to the listening experience than the gear.  I guess I always suspected that, and many of you probably know it all too well, but my experience this day cemented the fact for me.  As I walked out of the hotel I slipped on my KSC75’s, and fired up the Leckerton and iPod.  Damn it sounded good.  95% as good as the best sound I heard at the show.  I realized that I’m already pretty close to my headphone gear happy place.



Met Igor Levitsky, designer of the Oppo headphones.  He lives just north of Toronto.  Nice guy.  He’s designed lots of different audio components over the years and says headphones are particularly challenging.  He’s not a big believer in equipment “burn-in”.  Only brain burn-in.



Very nice rig.  HD800’s with a Questyle CMA 800i DAC/current mode amp being fed DSD files.  The designer built it to pair well with the HD800’s, thus the 800i model name.  $3500 better than my portable KSC75 rig?  Hmmm…