Have your say & ask the experts

Well, a mate and I spent 3 hours in the show today.....

Saw Andy, Dom, but no Clare

Very impressed with the whole show, to be honest.....first one I have attended, but I reckon I'll be back for another one very soon....

The guys at Alphason were very helpful, and not pushy at all (makes for a pleasant surprise!!)

The Marantz room was playing the PM6003/CD6003 combo, and to be honest we were not overly impressed....to us the Quad and Wharfdale 10 combo was a major highlight. What a sound from £200 speakers!! 

We also thought the Proac speakers were exceptional........

Loved the KEF eggs, and it was interesting for my mate to hear them, as he has the 2005.2's. And it was also interesting to hear 'high end' stereo equipment including all the valve amps on show..

On a negative note, I felt the cable companies missed a trick at the show! With such a divided opinion about cables, would it have been a good idea to be demostrating the improvements certain cables can give, rather than just having them for sale?

All in all, it was a fantastic day out, which I highly recommend to any hifi/av enthusiast.

Pistol Pete1:

Well, a mate and I spent 3 hours in the show today.....

Saw Andy, Dom, but no Clare

Very impressed with the whole show, to be honest.....first one I have attended, but I reckon I'll be back for another one very soon....

The guys at Alphason were very helpful, and not pushy at all (makes for a pleasant surprise!!)

The Marantz room was playing the PM6003/CD6003 combo, and to be honest we were not overly impressed....to us the Quad and Wharfdale 10 combo was a major highlight. What a sound from £200 speakers!! 

forgot to say....

went back to Marantz on way out and it did sound better...think the cd they were using on the way in was a poor one which made things sound a little dull and muddled.....

Different music on the way out, and we did wonder if the bigger speakers were being used till we got up close and found out it was the same system playing.....it's not all doom and gloom for Marantz!!!

I went to the show on saturday out of curiosity mainly. But to be honest, having worked in speaker design abroad, I am still appalled by the quality of audio reproduction available in this country. The only room that was bearable was the Wharfdale one with those little award winning speakers. It's not that we don't have the technical competences here, but we lack the philosophy and passion to make good audio. There's probably also a blockage by some of the elitist "30+" fools some other posters mentioned. I noticed a few european and Japanese rooms, and only had to stand at the door to hear they hadn't even made an effort and had brought along very compromised set-ups.

Now back to healing my ears, ouch

edit: to add a plus note there were some very good cables at the show, but I feel sorry for consumers... the best they can do is buy a decent cable, stick it on a shelf, wait for some decent hifis (probably a looong time) and save their ears.

matthewpiano:

cacophonix, did you not go into the UKD room with those stupendous Opera floorstanders powered up by that wonderful Unison Research amplifier?

That was the best hi-fi I've ever heard and I just can't imagine anything else getting closer to real live music.

What appealed about the Wharfedales in particular? I was bitterly disappointed with them.

Yes, I spoke to the UKD guy, but I'm a bit sickened that opera would have gone in for this. The philosophical stand point of "getting close" is nowhere near what you need to be in the business of sound REPRODUCTION. I think that with wharfdale, they're a big name and have a much wider range than most... so they could afford to get all the parts of the system right on the day. They also seemed very open with their designs (not as proud as others).

  matthewpiano: I just noticed you work with sony, and for me they usually get a lot right. Probably for similar reasons to wharfedale - they're a broad ranging company. Unfortunately all I saw was one of their TVs sitting silently on a stand. I was focusing on hifi

What do I think of the show?

Plus points:

Good advice about my future setup from the Sonos stand.

WHF demo suite - as I don't have a HD enabled av amp I have never heard the difference between 5.1 and HD audio. Stunning. So much so that I'm going to buy the Sony Bluray player with analogue outputs next. Brilliant stuff.

Still haven't bought those new speakers yet (probably the EB acoustics eb1's), but also  had a good look at each of the speaker rooms. Checked out the Cyrus room first and noted they were using dynaudio 110's. For some reason, I wasn't really impressed with their setup on show. There was a lack of standmounts on display (all floorstanders and AV), but I did like the Roksan Kandys and the Monitor Audios and the proac floorstanders were impressive.

Negatives:

Choice of music being played. Jazz club was constantly in session. All acoustic with female vocals. All very test disky and bland. An old guy even offered up a test disk to the Cyrus boys and guess what, jazz club/woman singer....Everywhere I went the cd of choice seemed to be have a blue cover with a car wing mirror on it. Should have written the artist's name down to avoid it in the future. Does anybody actually listen to this music other than to show off their systems?

Too many turntables being used as a source - not my thing sorry...

Too much Av. Too much James Bond and Pixar's Cars on display

Very bland stands from all of the TV boys, particularly pioneer. Never saw the Sony stand as I was too AV'd out to wait in line for the next demo...Kef had a good setup, although one room was playing HD jazz again...

Waited around for a while twice at the Chord stand to buy some interconnects, but gave up. Two guys working there looked very helpful and were really busy, more staff next time chord...you missed out on a £200 sale from me.

Audio T organised the show well, but when I have been to other format shows you have been able to buy discontinued/surplus gear at a good price at the show. Only one room upstairs, with what looked like the Audio T sale rack from their Manchester shop. Surely the company have more on offer...

Overall

Brilliant day out - wife and kids call it dad's nerd day out. It looks like the list above has more negatives than positives but the positives far outweighted the negatives. Roll on next year.

Just say no to the jazz next time.

I agree totally with you barnsleydave. I'm becoming a bit of an addict to the WHF forums and when the Beatles remasters were released, there was a massive interest in them. I expected to hear them somewhere at the show.

Also if you go to the what I've been listening to this week thread, very little jazzy music to slit your wrists to is mentioned.

Probably the majority of active forum posters are sub 50.

Saw a lot of 30 the 40 somethings on Saturday, but also many (no doubt affluent) fleeced up seniors with their matching fleeced up wives (who tended to carry the monitor audio carrier bag brimming with the sales literature for everything on show on the day and also the big handbag with jazz club cd demo disks in).

Now I think about it seems to me that those "noisy" AV suites were set up for the youngsters (with children still at home), whilst the Hifi rooms were set up for the more affluent oldsters. At 44, I have a foot in both camps. I prefer the hifi side, but my siblings always want to watch a movie or play Beatles Rock Band (Which I incidently love).

I sat there at one demo thinkin to myself, should have brought in some sex pistols or the clash. Not favourites of mine, but the response would have been interesting.

Sad thing is, as the MA RX2's had some more guttsier music going through them, first impressions were that I thought that they were quite good and I would consider giving them an audition when I finally purchase my mission 751 replacements (the saga continues - expect another thread and another letter in the mag before I finally make the puchase...) 

Hung around the Curvi room for a few minutes. Looked like they were well out of my price range. Thought the music made them sound a little lame, so I got my coat.....

"Everywhere I went the cd of choice seemed to be have a blue cover with a car wing mirror on it. Should have written the artist's name down to avoid it in the future." 

I'm curious now, what was the cd?

Somebody must own up to owning it out there

Pete Shields:

Sad thing is, as the MA RX2's had some more guttsier music going through them, first impressions were that I thought that they were quite good and I would consider giving them an audition when I finally purchase my mission 751 replacements (the saga continues - expect another thread and another letter in the mag before I finally make the puchase...) 

Hung around the Curvi room for a few minutes. Looked like they were well out of my price range. Thought the music made them sound a little lame, so I got my coat.....