First, I missed two rooms from the second floor in my last post. I just poked my head into each of these rooms, but didn’t really listen to anything.

First is the Audio Turntable room, home of the laser turntable (two can be seen in this picture) with Joseph Audio Pearl speakers and Halcro amplifiers.

Close-up of the Halcro monoblock and Joseph Audio Pearl.

Next is the Serious Stereo room which was just a quick in and out for me, so I don’t have any thoughts on sound.

Now on to the ninth floor of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2005.

The Spendor Audio room was all British, containing Spendor S5e ($1800) and S8e ($3000) along with Talk Electronics CD player ($1850) and integrated amplifier (~$2000). The S8e’s were hooked up when I came by

The Empirical Audio was very interesting. The focus was on demonstrating that a computer was a better source than a CD player/transport. To accomplish this, Steve Nugent had a somewhat complex setup diagramed here (sorry for the poor photo - it was too shiny for a flash and blurry without one)

This diagram shows that Steve had several sources: a stock Sony CD player with stock Perpetual Technologies P-3A DAC, a modded Sony CD player with a modded P-3A, an Empirical I2S Off-Ramp USB digital audio box with modded P-3A, a stock Benchmark DAC1 and a modded Benchmark DAC1. These fed into a modded Mark Levinson preamp and then a pair of modded Halo JC-1 monoblocks. The Off-Ramp (both I2S and S/PDIF versions) is a modded M-Audio Transit with a Superclock 3 that uses M-Audio drivers.

The result sounded very good, but I did not get a chance to hear one of the A/B comparisons to a CD source. I spent most of my time in the room talking with Steve and listening to him explain things to others. The Off-Ramp runs ~$1k, a modded P-3A is $2500, the preamp with mods would run ~$8k and the modded JC-1s would also run ~$8k (I don’t know about the speakers). Naturally, this doesn’t include the cost of the actual source computer.

Here’s a shot of the speakers and amps:

Then there was the Tyler Acoustics room featuring Linbrook System II speakers ($3600)

I briefly popped into the Red Wine Audio/Omega Loudspeakers room and they were discussing the best setup and plugging ports on speakers, so I didn’t hear anything, but the Lotus preamp/amp combo looked very nice

The Audio Federation room was one of the big bucks rooms both last year and this year and the components and layout were very similar both years. I want to first point out that the Audio Federation crew was one of the nicest groups both years. Both years featured Marten Design Coltrane speakers at $50k. While I was listening, the Audio Note Kegon amps were connected ($49k), but Edge NL Reference amps were also available ($125k). A Lamm L2 Reference preamp ($15k), Audio Aero CD/SACD player, EMMLabs transport and DAC, Brinkman turntable and Lamm phono preamp rounded out the system.

I thought the system sounded very good - it was better than I remember it being last year. Very clean and detailed and more well balanced that I remember.

Forward to page 3 of RMAF coverage

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