When you find yourself in a dirty stairwell taking a
picture of your own shoes, you know you’re hard-up for show coverage. That’s
what happened to us on the final day in Montreal.
We were a little disappointed with the Festival,
particularly because for many years we looked forward to it -- the first important
consumer-based show of the year. We wanted to find new and exciting audio/video products.
No more -- even with the show now being held in the larger, more spacious Sheraton Centre.
What seems to have happened is what I talked about
yesterday -- companies aren’t using this show to debut new products. We found pretty
much the same thing at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest last year. As a result, while these
shows are still reasonably good for consumers shopping for the products they read about,
for those of us in the press looking for the latest thing out there, they don’t hold
much newsworthiness.
For this reason the Festival Son & Image may be taken
off our A/V Tour next year, just as the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest was for this year.
We’ll be looking for some other show to cover -- perhaps the spring CEDIA Electronic
Lifestyles Expo held in Las Vegas. On the other hand, this year is hardly over with.
We’ll be in Munich in a month, and then the big CEDIA Expo in the fall. We have no
doubt that there will be plenty to cover there, and we won’t have to resort to
more pictures of our shoes.
***
In the past few years I’ve noticed an
interesting trend among the various shows we attend. Years ago I would see a plethora of
new-product introductions at numerous shows, but they're just not happening as much
anymore. For example, in the fall we were at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver, and
now, obviously, we’re at Son & Image in Montreal. The new-product debuts are few
and far between, and when they happen, they’re not done to coincide specifically with
the show. Rather; it’s more or less a coincidence, and the show’s timing is
simply convenient.
Instead, in North America at least, the new-product
introductions are mostly happening at CES and CEDIA, the two biggest A/V events of the
year, and ones that are closed off to the public and open only to industry people. As a
result, shows like this one in Montreal are quite a bit less relevant for those of us in
the press than they used to be, and I suspect that this will be a trend that carries on.
Furthermore, consumers are being left out of the excitement of the “big
launches”; instead, they’re forced to wait and read about them, usually online.
However, this seems to be isolated to North America. The
High End show in Munich, for example, has grown and seems to host many new-product
introductions from European and Asian brands, and it's open to the public. We’ll be
at this show in about a month, and I’m excited to see what will appear, because,
unfortunately, there are few debuts in Montreal, and most of the "new" products
shown here are what we covered at CES and CEDIA.
***
One of the first systems that I listened to in
Montreal was one that was most familiar to me, and one of the very best you can buy –
Aurum Acoustic’s award-winning Integris CDP/Active 300B system. It will set you back
$42,000 -- a substantial sum -- but I've heard many systems that are far more expensive
and don’t sound nearly as good. For instance, I listened to a well-reviewed pair of
$45,000 floorstanding two-ways (I’m talking about speakers only here) that
could be bettered by speakers one-tenth of their price. I’m not exaggerating. Quite
frankly, there’s too much of that these days. In comparison, the complete Aurum
Acoustics system is a screaming bargain.
In some ways the Aurum system is rather conventional -- the
speakers are a sealed-box three-way design, for example -- but in other ways quite
innovative: line-level active crossover; six channels of amplification, four of which are
tube-based and the other two solid-state; and CD player and preamplifier in one chassis.
The idea is to make a system that works ideally as a whole, and the way Aurum Acoustics
gets there is to use what they see as the appropriate technology in the right spots. To my
ears, Derrick Moss, who designed the entire system, got it right. In my October 2006
review of the speaker system I said, “Aurum Acoustics’ Integris CDP and Active
300B comprise one of the most resolving, revealing, and pleasing stereo systems I’ve
ever heard.” It was true then, and it’s as true now.
Aurum’s system is one of the best in the world. Make
the effort to hear it. [www.aurumacoustics.com]
