Salon Audio Montréal Audiofest Show Report Report By Rick Becker
Best Room @ The Salon Audio Montréal Audiofest Show 2023
This finally brings me around to my selection of the Best Rooms at the show this year. Since all rooms are not created equal at the Hotel Bonaventure, I am compelled to list a number of rooms that were standouts either for sound quality or some other obscure reason that impressed me and sticks in my mind weeks after the show is over. My list included five rooms that were really top-tier for any show, anywhere. And a second list of ten came in just a step behind them, some of whom have been among the Best Rooms in the past. I decided to keep the bar high this year while acknowledging that there was a lot of great gear in many rooms beyond the five mentioned here. The top five were all expensive systems. When money becomes a factor, you need to cherry pick among the highest value products available and tweak your system and your room to the max. But it can be done.
My congratulations go out to Best Rooms:
St Laurent 8 Oracle Audio, Gershman Acoustics, Eon Art, And Cardas Audio
These four brands constitute an A-Team in any league. While Eon Art may be a relative newcomer, it has consistently shown that it belongs with the veterans here.
St. Laurent8 Oracle Audio Technologies, Gershman Acoustics, Eon Art Canada, And Cardas Audio
I had been given a ‘heads-up’ from the Gershmans that they would be playing two different speakers and that I should come on both Saturday and Sunday to hear both of them. I had heard about their new 30th Anniversary Grand Avant Garde; it was one of the hits of the Florida show.
The other was a new stand-mounted Studio Xdb monitor (12k$, including the stand and Gaia footers) that was outstanding, not just for the sound quality, but also because it is a very wide-range speaker that could play exceptionally well in this large room.
My problem in this room is that I know the people too well and I get doubly distracted by the sound quality. Hence, it is my error that I forgot to take photos of the monitors. (Pictured on their website.)
Coming back on Sunday, the 30th Grand Avant Garde was singing loud and clear, filling this large room with wonderful music, regardless of the genre — and I stayed long enough to hear several. As for the photos…well, the room was dark and the speakers were black with a hot spotlight on them. That’s not important. All you had to do here was close your eyes and listen. And at something like 17k$, this is a very high-value speaker that should be on adar of a lot more people.
The form factor of the new Grand Avant Garde has changed for the better. Instead of the platform that sticks out the back along the floor, there is now a separate box beneath the traditional Avant Garde form. Both of these appendages are actually addition volume added to the speaker to extend the bass lower. The new form suggests the granite base under the top models of Vandersteen’s more expensive speakers, so it is conceptually already an accepted form factor that makes the Grand Avant Garde… well, even more Grand. For those with pets with curious noses, there is an unusual, but elegant wood grill offered.
The music heard here was courtesy of the very fine Oracle Delphi Mk VI Signature turntable and their Paris PH200 Mk III phono stage. Amplification was through the extraordinary Eon Arts integrated amplifier, seen duplicated here so the drawer of the lower unit could be pulled out to reveal the sophisticated engineering within. Cabling was by Cardas.
