Capital AudioFest 2011

The Surreal Sound Speaker ($10,000/pair) is the small, three-way floorstander finished in cherry, not the massive bass bin behind it, which belongs to the GOTO Horns speaker (see next story). Surreal Sound's Ralph Helmer is passionate about midrange, feeling it is in the midrange where the music truly lives. To that end, his speaker features a beryllium-disc midrange unit, mounted in an open baffle. A Heil Air Motion Transfomer supertweeter and three spider-less, aluminum-alloy, 10" cone drivers for the bass, all also mounted in open baffles, complete the drive-unit line-up. Mr; Helmer believes that one of the advantages of his dipole speakers is their high Wife-Acceptance Favor, in that they are smaller than expected for same amount of bass.

These $150k/pair monsters weren't playing either time I went into this room. But they win the prize for most "Awesome-Looking Speaker at the Show." And there's my favorite hotel carpet again!

One of the Command Performance AV rooms at Capital AudioFest featured Carnegie speakers, the CST-2 ($5999/pair), which combines a Mylar-film planar tweeter with eight 5.25" composite-cone woofers in a slim tower supported on a marble base. The speakers were driven by Manley Mahi EL84 monoblocks and a Manley 300B preamp, with the source a silent CommandPC server feeding 352.8kHz USB data to the Light Harmonic Da Vinci DAC that had impressed at the Atlanta Axpona. The DAC has been upgraded since Axpona: when handling 16-bit data, it would pad out bits 17–24 with 0s to give 24-bit data, which is standard practice. But in 2s-complement digital arithmetic, which is how audio data are encoded on a CD, there are actually two zero levels: 16 0s but also 16 1s, which represents a magnitude one LSB lower. Light Harmonic's engineers found that if they padded 16-bit data with 8 1s rather than 8 0s, the sound improved.

The Audience room was featuring the Clairaudient 2+2s ($5000/pair) when I popped in for a listen. This speaker features four metal-cone units, two on the front two on the back, operated full-range, and reinforced by a passive bass radiator on one of the speaker's sides. Brian Damkroger enthused about the clarity conferred by the absence of a crossover when he reviewed the speaker in the July 2011 issue, but I was less keen on its balance, finding it very forward. Both aspects was readily apparent at Capital AudioFest, though I admit the room's acoustics were problematic. This is definitely a speaker that you must audition for yourself.

"Where's the tweeter?" I asked after a listen to the 97dB-sensitive Soundfield speakers, shown at Capital AudioFest in prototype form. It turned out the top drive-unit is a 12" coaxial unit, with the HF unit mounted where the dust-cap would be. "So the big-ass 18" dipole unit is the subwoofer?" No, it was explained, the18" unit in the speaker's center, behind the grille, is the woofer, covering the range from 50–200Hz. The bottom 12" unit, mounted in a sealed enclosure is the subwoofer, handling frequencies below 50Hz. With the coaxial and 18" drivers operating as dipoles and the bottom12" unit omnidirectional, by varying the crossover between the low-frequency drivers, the speaker's radiation pattern can be made cardioid in the region where room acoustics might benefit. I had seen a cardioid subwoofer designed by Ken Kantor many years ago at a CES, and had wondered why no-one else had experimented along these lines.

That's the title of the book Ken Kessler wrote about the iconic American high-end audio company, and which was reviewed in the May 2007 issue of Stereophile. Shown here in the second room hosted by retailer JS Audio, next to the McIntosh turntable, which I believe is the only product not made in the company's Binghamton, the book reinforces the idea that despite changing owners several times over the decades. McIntosh has not lost its institutional memory.

Although I had seen the 4-way, floorstanding Polk LSiM 707 ($4000/pair) at the Montreal Show in April, they weren't being demmed in an optimal room. But driven at Capital AudioFest by an Audio Research stack—CD8 CD player, Ref3 preamplifier, and VS110 power amplifier—and hooked up with MIT cable, they gave great sound on Keb Mo's version of "It Hurts Me Too" from his The Door CD, with extended low frequencies and impressive dynamics.