Silverstone show, visitor reports.

Interesting show....with VERY average sounds but then what do you expect from hotel room acoustics!

My highlight/ lowlight was a demo by HiFi World's Noel Keywood re: CD compared to Vinyl.

Now I'm a big vinyl fan with over 11000 LPs. I have a very good CD player but the TT just kills it. I've never heard a CD player come close.
The interesting thing about the Noel Keywood demo was that for all the positives he put forward for vinyl and the negs for CD, the system he had did the COMPLETE OPPOSITE! What a joke!!!! I heard people saying 'I'm not getting a turntable' ' is that what good vinyl sounds like'.... Noel Keywood did a complete disservice to the format. There he was pushing vinyl and he actually put about 50 people off the format! IDIOT!

THANKS NOEL ---- HANG UP YOUR HAT.

Jordan Acoustics was a good room. I quite liked the Adam and Art loudspeakers playing and could hear their potential through all of that bad points of the room. Nice setup Tim.

Rob.

 

Hi Rob,

What was he using in this dem? Did anyone speak out and say it was bad during the seesion? I didn't go into any of the pre booked dems this year.

SCIDB

 

Hi. Newbie here. Looks like an own goal by Hi-Fi World after Noel going on about vinyl superiority for years. Interested in what kit he was using. Was it his Garrard 401 with 12" SME ? This realy annoys me as it's pretty difficult to achieve this. Should leave dems to DP.

Paul.

 

does anybody know how much that new quad int. cost's i forgot to ask them,
nando.

 

Given high quality masters in both cases, that sounds like the right result. Good CD is much better than good TT under those conditions - far more faithful to the master.
I don't thing people realise just how much distortion there is with vinyl.

Vinyl is fine if the CD version is poorly mastered or you want to collect older recordings.

 

Highlights for me were the Artisan Audio room (showing Soundsmith gear with some ruinously expensive half-open baffle speakers) and EAR.

Lowlights were the big Cabasse speakers and, surprisingly, Audio Note. Both sounding harsh and with booming overblown bass when I visited.

 

Puresound/ Guy

If you're reading this - any news on the new Pre-amp? (shown in Simons photos above)

I saw this at the show, looked like a nicely engineered Pre. Is this a from-the-ground-up design by yourself - like the P10 phono stage?

It was a shame the pre was 'display only' at the show. I would have liked to have some A/B dems on it.

Here are details for readers

http://www.puresound.info/id1.html


Cheers
Chris

 

Hi Chris,

It was on display in our room

 

Hi Chris,

That pre amp is in production as it was on dem with the equipment playing in the (PURESOUND) room. It's not cheap @ £4000+.

SCIDB

 

Hi Chris

the L300 was playing in the aircraft hangar that was the Luffield room on the 1st floor. I supplied the electronics for Aspara to use with their loudspeakers. I believe they were promised a room that was 9m x 6m which might have been quite nice.

The room they were given was more like 18m x 13m and probably 4m high!

Their HL1 speakers were certainly able to produce reasonable levels in there without straining but the size & height of the room meant there was more reverberant sound blurring things than would have been optimal. And you can't begin to 'treat' a room that size, certainly not the night before a show anyway.

Anyway, other than that aspect I quite enjoyed the show & thought it was a pleasant venue although the downstairs bedrooms were perhaps a little small compared with those the Park Inn or even the Bristol Marriott. Better signage might also have helped, it was something of a maze.

The L300 was a joint effort really. When I first talked with the factory about doing it they didn't actually know what a line stage was. But they made some very useful contributions alongside what I was suggesting & I'm quite pleased with the end result.

There is a smaller Line Stage on its way called the L10 which will also have output transformers & remote control. I hope to get the first sample of that within the month.

 

HI,

That was one hell of a large room! That hotel had a few rooms of that sort of size.

I to thought the speakers did well in that room. Very enjoyable it was.

The sign should have been better. It was easy to get lost. The room numbers were confusing for some. Some rooms di seem smaller than others.

This is an interesting pre amp. You don't see many with a 300B in circuit. Is there going to be a matching killer phono stage?

This sounds fun.


SCIDB

 

The 300B acts as the pass valve in the regulated power supply.

The intention is to do an LCR type phono stage but I have a couple of power amplifiers to get into production first.

 

Hi,

A couple of power amps. What sort? How about a pair of 845 mono blocks?

SCIDB

 

by Robholt

I've never found CD to be better than vinyl in anyway. I now use a VPI HRX with a Graham Phantom and Ortofon PW and it has bettered EVERY CD player I've heard in this system. I eventually settled for the Nagra CDP (2007 version) because I really like the look of it BUT in audio terms is about 10 light years behind vinyl with or without quality masters.

I think Noel Keywood was using a Pioneer table/ SME M2? and Ortofon 2M RED (£400ish MM) through a really crappy sounding phono stage through a ??preamp, Krell amps and PMCs. Unfortunately Noel Keywood has no idea what sounds good but then like Mr Miller he loves to measure stuff....

He really should have left the topic alone or at least made sure whatever he was on about could be backed up by the demonstration.

No, nobody stood up to say anything but quite a few folks commented afterwards (amoungst one another) on just how poor the vinyl sounded compared to the CD.

I generally only go to the Munich show and Vegas and have always found the UK shows lacking...not in equipment but in organisation and preparation.

Rob

 

yeah lets get a zerogain minibus to Munich next year.

We can get pissed up !

lol

 

good idea, count me in,
nando.

 

Munich had vastly better sound this year - some rooms sounded genuinely good (obviously not all).

I also went to the Noel Keywood demo (vinyl/CD); 1/ I thought he was never going to stop wittering on and actually do the demo. 2/ he used a very strange mix of equipment - at one point the deck completely lost the plot and produced so much wow I thought he had caught his trouser leg on the platter. If I wanted to demo LP I certainly wouldn't have chosen a barely working DD turntable or a MM cartridge (even a £400 one) 3/ He insisted on playing the whole of each track - has he never done an A/B demo before? 4/ the volume matching between sources was crap. 5/ the PMC speakers used energised the room as though someone had hidden a badly adjusted sub-woofer in the room. The whole exercise was badly done and a complete waste of time.

 

YNMOAN

Yes... a complete waste of time.

 

never trust reviewers, magic triks and all that, one thing that puzzled me if not very dissapointed was that almost all of all of the exibitors were using i-pods as source or servers, why not walkmans or potable cd's ? i personally found that an insult, not only to me but those who trabel all the way there to hear a decent source throgh a whatever decent audio eq. how low was that? might as well demo a cheap teac all in one inc. an ipod base,my opinion ,
nando

 

I think the organisers were hoping for the younger generation coming in..... trouble is what student is going to travel down some little country road in the middle of nowhere to go to a show full of 55 year old, balding men? I spoke to Roy at the show and he was really aiming the show at the 'younger' folk....