The Pacific Audio Fest 2022 - Positive Feedback

Ye Olde Editor with some very fine coffee. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2015. (Photograph by Lila Ritsema.)

Time to continue my Pacific Audio Fest 2022 Audio Oasis! Awards.

Part the Second, then...onwards!

Parasound/Innuos/Marantz/Dr. Feickert/Norstone/Straight Wire/KEF

Here's an eyeful of an earful of a fine-sounding room…

The Parasound/Innuos/KEF/etc. room featured some designs from companies that I knew…JC Curl/Parasound and Innuos, in this case.

As I would have expected with JC Curl kit, the sound was nicely transparent and provided plenty of detail, without ever losing touch with the music. The Innuos Zenith 1TB Music Server did a solid job of presenting digital files, and while it doesn't operate at the same stellar level as the Innuos Statement, it certainly does quite well at its $4699 price point.

In fact, every time that I've heard Innuos at an audio show, I have liked what I'm hearing...and their latest gen versions are definitely upping their performance. I'm hoping to arrange a review of the Innuos Statement package ASAP this fall; stay tuned for that.

The KEF Blade Meta Loudspeakers ($35,000/pair) were unfamiliar to me. Side-firing woofers, and a mid-tweet facing front, provided an open and spacious sound, if perhaps a bit light on the bass during the times that I was there. That could, of course, been a function of the source recordings while I was in the room, as well.

After consideration, I concluded that the Parasound/Innuos/KEF/etc. room did enough things right to be worthy of an Audio Oasis! Award.

Done.

High End by Oz/United Home Audio/Thrax Audio/Vitus Audio/Hifistay/Borreson Acoustics/Synergistic Research

This room had an real avalanche of great reference-grade components on display. In fact, the stated value of what was in this room came to a whopping $776,000, should you want (and have the bucks to purchase) the Full Monty.

UHA's three-box top-o'-the-heap SuperDeck RTR (at a cool $90,000) provided much of the music during the times that I was in the room. Greg Beron does a fine job of taking his Tascam-based machines and hot-rodding/modding them to the max. The separate power supply with its eye-catching VUs drops the noise floor noticeably over earlier models that from UHA that I have either evaluated here or listened to at shows. The results invariably lead to my Brutus Awards/my Audio Oasis! Awards for UHA over the years.

And rightly so.

[Update 09-08-2022]

Greg supplied some extra commentary on his SuperDeck RTR which will help our readers to appreciate what he has done here:

"[The UHA SuperDeck] consists of:

The Tape Transport – Just rolls the tape past a fixed tape head. That’s it. It has 3 DC motors in it, but no power transformer or any power supply. That is all accomplished in the Outboard Power Supply.

The Outboard Head Amp: With large blue VU Meters it amplifies the signal off the tape head and sends the signal to a preamp via XLR or RCA outputs.

The Outboard Power Supply: Takes AC from the wall, filters it through an inboard RF/EMI filter, and then converts it to DC power. There is only DC power in the Tape Transport and in the Outboard Head Amp; no AC at all in either unit."

I appreciate Greg's correction and clarification.

Oz Turan at PAF 2022: a portrait

As always, Oz Turan of High End by Oz was a courteous and skilled host for his room. The man has presence!

I enjoyed his presentations about the various components in the room. He especially talked about the tube-based Vitus Thrax Masterpiece Series two-box Libra 300 line preamp at $65,500, the Thrax Masterpiece Series Spartacus 300 Monoblocks at $97,500 per pair (50 watts per channel!), and the loudspeakers, which were the Danish Audio Group's Børresen 05 Silver Supreme Edition at $214,500. (Yes, it does all add up.)

Did I mention the 50 watts? I did?

But what glorious watts!

There was no sense of dynamic restriction or “tubey” sound. Paired with the Borreson 05 Silver Supreme Loudspeakers, which I had not heard before, this system was making music of enormous scale, and yet had detail and delicacy by the megaton.

Damned impressive.

Greg Beron of United Home Audio with one of his two-box reference RTR decks in the High End by Oz room…a great music ma-cheen! Done by a fine hoo-man!

Yes, I spent a lot of time here, and found it hard to leave. That's always a sure sign of an Audio Oasis! Award brewing.

The beautiful and majestic Borreson 05 Silver Supreme on display

Oz Turan: a portrait

And so, here's an Audio Oasis! Award for the participants in this exceptional room…and very well deserved.

Convergent Audio Technologies/Essential Sound Products/VPI/iFi/Magico/Audio Aero

An ink outline of Ken Stevens of Convergent Audio Technology doing a presentation in the CAT/ESP/VPI/iFi/Magico/Audio Aero space

I don't know what it is about Convergent Audio Technology, but whenever I've encountered them over the years at this or that audio show, I've always liked what I heard. No matter the rest of the system, Ken's designs seem to bring out great results from tubes.

Ken Griffin of ESP and Ken Stevens of CAT in ink outline

At PAF 2022, CAT worked with Essential Sound Products (ESP), VPI, iFi, and Magico, all excellent products in both the analog and digital domains. There was a tasty synergy happening in this room that sounded well with all of the sources that I heard.

To be specific, the components in this room included the VPI Classic Signature turntable at $6399, with a van den Hul Crimson cartridge costing $5495, Magico's S5 original version loudspeakers at $45,400/pair, iFi Audio's splendid iDSD Pro Signature tipping the beam at $3249, an Audio Aero CD player belonging to Ken Stevens that is no longer in production, assorted interconnects and loudspeaker cables, and Michael Griffin's ESP power cables. CAT's essential contributions included the CAT SL1 Legend Extreme preamp at $59,990, the JL5 LE Limited Edition stereo power amplifier at $27,995, a pair of the JL7 SE Special Edition mono amps costing $59,990 per the couple.

Both Jim and Ulrike Anderson of Anderson Audio NY did special presentations in the room, wrapped around discussions of their production and engineering of Patricia Barber's Clique album. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend these sessions, but I know Jim…he's visited here at PF Central before. An excellent fellow, for sure; he and Ulrike are a rare team of talents in high-end audio music. You can purchase any of their works with confidence.

Note that they're doing promising work with DXD and 5.1 surround; you'll want to follow the results.

So…time for another one of my Audio Oasis! Awards. Given with pleasure.

Part the Third of my PAF 2022 Audio Oasis! Awards will be following very shortly...

All photographs and image processing by David W. Robinson, unless otherwise noted. The Alice in Wonderland drawing by Sir John Tenniel is in the public domain.