And to think, this is only the first day. Bob Levi is predicting up to 10,000 attendees over the course of the three-day show.
Having covered shows with John before, and seen how many people come up to him to chat as he attempts to get from point A to point B, I had my doubts that we could somehow manage to talk undisturbed. Talk? We never even got that far. Conversation upon conversation began as soon as John hit lobby. Here, Bob Levi, President of the Los Angeles Orange County Audiophile Society (left), engages John in conversation as, right behind them, Jonathan Scull, PR man extraordinaire and former Stereophile Contributing Editor (second from left), and Dave Clark of Positive Feedback Online (second from right) do the same. Unseen are the many exhibitors who are staggering into the lobby after spending an entire day trying to get their equipment unpacked and positioned optimally.
Scheduled for Friday June 1Sunday June 3 in sunny Orange County, California's red state within a blue state, the second annual T.H.E. Show Newport Beach has already expanded from the Hilton Hotel, right across the street from the John Wayne/Orange County Airport, to the adjacent Atrium Hotel. Just shy of 300 exhibitors are expected to fill 80 hotel rooms and 15 huge exhibit rooms in the Hilton, 10 or 12 booths in the Hilton "Marketplace," and another 3540 hotel rooms and 15 huge exhibit rooms in the Atrium.
Equally adept at all three disciplines, Fischer-Dieskau became perhaps the most recorded baritone in history. There was a period in which nary a month went by without another LP from Fischer-Dieskau on which he sang either solo or in ensemble. Even today, when so many recordings have gone out of print, and large number of LPs have never been remastered for CD, arkivmusic.com lists no less than 490 titles that include Fischer-Dieskau's voice. The most recent release, a four-SACD remastered compilation of some of the monaural Schubert lieder (art song) recordings he made with pianists Gerald Moore and Karl Engel early in his career, became available on the website on May 8. Its 39 performances are but a fraction of the Schubert recordings he made in his five decades before the microphone.
At 12 noon PST today, Dolby Laboratories, Inc. announced the availability of the first Blu-ray Discs premastered using Dolby® TrueHD with advanced 96k upsampling, The process, designed for use by studios, authoring houses, and mastering facilities, elevates playback performance of lossless audio on Blu-ray Disc by using the apodizing filter developed by Meridian.
Due to this unforeseeable snafu, what a very full house of eager audiophiles heard was not the Raidho 2.1 in all its glory, but a literally out-of-the-crate speaker whose drivers, capacitors, and circuits, by all accounts, had undergone only something like 5 hours of break-in. There was nothing that even Nordost's Lars Christensen, creator of the most masterfully conceived and executed audio demos I have ever witnessed, could do about the fact that the speaker could only provide an tantalizing albeit incomplete indication of its ultimate potential.