I have been meaning to post a mini report about what I saw at CEDIA Expo.
First off, the JBL booth... they had a sound room with a Synthesis theater installed. I didn't check it out as I have heard a few Synthesis systems and didn't have extra time to revisit systems... I was at the show to see and hear new stuff. They did have a single Project Array 800 speaker sitting there among several Synthesis products. I was surprised at how tiny it was. It was cute, but hard to take seriously due to scale. It had a beautiful finish and looked really well made. I wish they had the entire line. They were also showing the Performance Series... it was the first time I saw them in person... I had been told on this forum that in person they looked better than they do in photos... maybe. Just not my cup of tea I guess. I didn't really see anything else there that caught my eye. There was a ton of iPod and other entry level bits with the JBL logo on them.
The Revels powered by the Mark Levinson gear was the best sounding system that I heard at the show.
http://audioheritage.org/vbulletin/s...vel#post125488
Almost as good and significantly less costly, were the Pioneer S-1 EX speakers. I was fortunate to get a private two channel demo of them. They were set up as a 5.1 HT system, but the designer was there and like me prefers to do critical listening in the 2 channel mode. After the demo guys had run a very nice HT demo including Blu-Ray, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD, Andrew gave us a private demo and turned off the sub, switched the speakers into bi-amp mode and played some 2 channel music. The sound was very good despite being powered by a Pioneer receiver. (He normally shows his other designs with Pass Labs electronics.) The imaging was incredible, the voicing was quite neutral, they were very dynamic for a relatively small system, and were capable of real music SPLs. They did have a slightly pronounced but well controlled and solid bottom end, but then so do his other designs that I have heard.
In the new and notable column there was Audyssey.
http://www.audyssey.com/soundequalizer.html
This line level device is an automatic room correction device. It really worked too. The outboard Audyssey device costs $2500 and a slightly stripped down version is available in the TOTL Denon AV receivers and will be included in others soon. Essentially the device corrects for phase and time issues along with problems in the frequency domain... yeah we have heard all of that before... well this is the first unit I have heard that actually worked, even including the DEQX room correction. The Audyssey device uses some familiar technologies, but it implements them in a unique way. Instead of averaging a number of discrete measurements it uses unique algorithms and fuzzy logic. The result was that when the unit was turned on the sense of space became truly 3D, the bass tightened up, and the overall sound was clearer and more enveloping.
I saw piles of speakers, amps, controllers, and stuff... lots of stuff... the most remarkable thing I saw, heard and felt, was the Eminent Technology Model 17 Rotary subwoofer. The damn thing looks like a fancy room fan. It is essentially a fan that has a woofer voice coil on it and as the coil moves back and forth it changes the pitch of the blades... the result is bass from around 1 Hz up to 30Hz... it has a sensitivity of 94 db/watt at 10Hz. When they demonstrated the subwoofer with a sinewave generator, the entire room was excited numerous times... the drop ceiling was bouncing up and down a couple of inches, the DLP projector that was ceiling mounted was swaying back and forth... the closed door to the room vibrated violently on it's hinges... we heard/felt 4Hz like you've never experienced it!
They demonstrated it as a sub for a HT... it didn't work due to software limitations.... since the sound engineers are not using subs that delve into these depths they tend to jack up the subsonics to a level that makes "normal" high quality subs really thump... with this model the blast of a shotgun, or the boom of a bomb blast was unrealistically portrayed with far too much VLF information... it was impressive, but nowhere near realistic sounding. I think that if the recordings were accurate, this device would really be able to recreate the subsonic information that is indeed all around us. If this device had been around for the movie, Earthquake... people would have really panicked! Those giant Cerwin Vega horns couldn't do a tenth of what this little guy can... really amazing.
http://www.eminent-tech.com/RWbrochure.htm
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