North West Audio Show 2023 - Cranage nr Holmes Chapel.
Called in on Saturday morning before heading off to Oulton Park for the racing. Didn't have much time, and the show was huge. My lad an I got there for around 10am, and all we managed to cover was one out the the three(!) floors in about 90 minutes.
Doug Brady had a big presence with several areas and individual displays.
The little Nait looked very retro '80s
Gauging sound is always tricky at shows. A lot of the time a potentially good system could be held back because the room is too small or there's a limit on how loud it can play because of the neighbouring exhibitors. Other times it's just the music choice; slow and dreary plinky-plink Hi-Fi selections.
Kudos then to the guys at the GoldenEar room. They let me loose with the tablet, and after a bit of Lamb 'Gold' scared off some on the room but brought others in (what!?!), I finally managed to play a bit of The Undertones - Teenage Kicks. That did the trick and sent the purists scampering away. LOL
Here you can see one making a hasty exit... HA-HA-HA
Other rooms that were fun...
Brian and Trevors rocking some ATCs and sounded lovely with an LP12 playing some electro track I think. Toe tapping stuff, for sure.
The guy demoing in the Audio Note room wasn't afraid to veer off the audiophile musical path without a safety net either, and made some great toe-tapping sounds as a result.
Vinyl was very much in evidence and sounded very organic for the most part. That or streaming/file playback were the main flavours of the day.
It would have been nice to listen to this, but sadly the guy in the dem room didn't have it playing on the two occasions I called in. Too many visitors interested in how it works rather than how it sounds.
Henley Distribution had the Klipsch Heritage Forte IV on demo, but seemed to be doing an outstanding job of making these £6.5K speakers sound very small.
There was CD and SACD evident, so those formats haven't shuffled off the mortal coil yet.
Even reel-to-reel making an appearance again
What struck me though was just how many rooms were spending a hell of a lot of money to make quite a small sound.
Just for the record, I'll state again that some of the lack of scale is because of the limitations of the show format. Even so, how can one really judge what's worth further investigation without a bit of scale? So difficult.
By contrast, Hifonix has a room where they could let rip a bit. Nice visual presentation too. (The photo doesn't do it justice, but it's a smart phone cam picture because I couldn't be bothered schlepping round with a DSLR.)
There was a lot more to see on the same floor. Headphone demos, lots of tweaky gadgets, record cleaning. I had a brief but interesting chat with a guy doing room acoustic measurement, Room Sonics. There was also a room with the Schitt gear where a chap was talking about using DSP per song(!) like glorified tone controls; Electromod.
That's all I have time for. Good show. Big, busy - even if the photos don't make it look like that - some good demos. Definitely worth a visit.
Called in on Saturday morning before heading off to Oulton Park for the racing. Didn't have much time, and the show was huge. My lad an I got there for around 10am, and all we managed to cover was one out the the three(!) floors in about 90 minutes.
Doug Brady had a big presence with several areas and individual displays.
The little Nait looked very retro '80s
Gauging sound is always tricky at shows. A lot of the time a potentially good system could be held back because the room is too small or there's a limit on how loud it can play because of the neighbouring exhibitors. Other times it's just the music choice; slow and dreary plinky-plink Hi-Fi selections.
Kudos then to the guys at the GoldenEar room. They let me loose with the tablet, and after a bit of Lamb 'Gold' scared off some on the room but brought others in (what!?!), I finally managed to play a bit of The Undertones - Teenage Kicks. That did the trick and sent the purists scampering away. LOL
Here you can see one making a hasty exit... HA-HA-HA
Other rooms that were fun...
Brian and Trevors rocking some ATCs and sounded lovely with an LP12 playing some electro track I think. Toe tapping stuff, for sure.
The guy demoing in the Audio Note room wasn't afraid to veer off the audiophile musical path without a safety net either, and made some great toe-tapping sounds as a result.
Vinyl was very much in evidence and sounded very organic for the most part. That or streaming/file playback were the main flavours of the day.
It would have been nice to listen to this, but sadly the guy in the dem room didn't have it playing on the two occasions I called in. Too many visitors interested in how it works rather than how it sounds.
Henley Distribution had the Klipsch Heritage Forte IV on demo, but seemed to be doing an outstanding job of making these £6.5K speakers sound very small.
There was CD and SACD evident, so those formats haven't shuffled off the mortal coil yet.
Even reel-to-reel making an appearance again
What struck me though was just how many rooms were spending a hell of a lot of money to make quite a small sound.
Just for the record, I'll state again that some of the lack of scale is because of the limitations of the show format. Even so, how can one really judge what's worth further investigation without a bit of scale? So difficult.
By contrast, Hifonix has a room where they could let rip a bit. Nice visual presentation too. (The photo doesn't do it justice, but it's a smart phone cam picture because I couldn't be bothered schlepping round with a DSLR.)
There was a lot more to see on the same floor. Headphone demos, lots of tweaky gadgets, record cleaning. I had a brief but interesting chat with a guy doing room acoustic measurement, Room Sonics. There was also a room with the Schitt gear where a chap was talking about using DSP per song(!) like glorified tone controls; Electromod.
That's all I have time for. Good show. Big, busy - even if the photos don't make it look like that - some good demos. Definitely worth a visit.
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