Capital AudioFest 2012

As you can see from the massive 1930s cinema-style horn system that graced the Crowne Plaza’s Salon I, there was a significant retro vibe to the 2012 Capital Audiofest, something that became clear as I started my sweep of the second-floor rooms.

I said in my first story from this year’s Capital Audiofest, the third overall and the second to be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Rockville, MD July 13–16, that this wasn’t like other audio shows. On the positive side, CAF had a great atmosphere, friendly and collegial, with great organization from Gary Gill and his team. The hotel had a goodly number of rooms with manageable acoustics, and the hotel staff was friendly and supportive. The live music was superb. Every showgoer I spoke with said that they were having a great time at CAF, that the Metro Washington DC area really does need a show like this, and it was great to hear so many products. And the nightly raffle—my photo shows Gary Gill holding up one of the prizes at the Saturday evening event—was an excellent draw, with the big prize a Benchmark DAC 1 D/A headphone amplifier.

I started off Saturday morning at the Capital Audiofest by revisiting Salon II in the Crowne Plaza’s atrium, where I chatted with AIX Records’ Mark Waldrep. Recently the subject of a fascinating interview on AudioStream.com, Mark has been a voluble and ubiquitous advocate of high-resolution surround-sound recordings. At CAF, however, he was using headphones to demonstrate his AIX recordings. But with a difference—to the left of my photo you can see a Smyth Realiser, which allows full surround-sound to be experienced on headphones (see “Music in the Round,” November 2010). On the DVD-R versions of AIX releases, Mark has included full-resolution 2-channel FLAC files prepared with the Smyth Realiser from playback of the original multichannel recordings on his reference system. I tried one of these files, called “Headphones [xi],” and was impressed. The soundfield extended well outside my head, with good localization of the rear-channel information. In effect, I was transported via headphones to Mark’s listening room.

Lunch and live music both over, it was time to head back to the exhibits. First stop on the third floor was one of the rooms from Metro Washington DC retailer Command AV, featuring DeVore Fidelity’s Orangutan/96 speakers ($12,000/pair). Combining the unorthodox coupling of a 1” silk-dome tweeter with a 10” paper-cone woofer in a stunningly finished, wider-than-it-is deep enclosure, the O/96 offers a equally stunningly high sensitivity of 96dB/W/m. I had heard the O/96s at Artie Dudley’s a couple of weeks back and was impressed by how the O/96 matched the midrange magic of vintage speakers while adding things I deem essential, like highs and lows. The speakers sounded as good at CAF as they had in upstate NY, both speakers and room stepping out of the way of the music on the Ray Brown/Duke Ellington duo LP This One’s For Blanton.

The Capital Audiofest is not like other shows, which was emphasized when I finally walked into the atrium of Rockville, MD’s Crowne Plaza Hotel. There was show organizer Gary Gill wailing on trombone in a set of free jazz with drummer Kirk Kubicek Jr. and bass player Harry Walker. Walker was playing/stroking/tapping a fretless Ashbory Bass, which makes up for its short 18” scale length by having very thick, heavy silicone-rubber strings. Despite the unstructured nature of the music, the trio created fascinating and compelling soundscapes, rivaled only by those created in a later set by headlining act Janel Leppin and Anthony Pirog, on electrified cello and electric guitar, respectively.