I’m on my way home from the Munich High End audio show where we were running continuous demos of the Beolab 90’s (an 8’45” mix of tracks on repeat from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. for 4 days… It will be a while before I get the Chris Jones, Lyle Lovett and the Foo Fighters out of my head…)
We used an intentionally bare room – one Oppo Blu-ray player playing the .wav file off a USB stick, connected via S/P-DIF to the Beolab 90’s. Nothing else was in the room except three chairs, a lamp, and the people. The floor was carpeted, the ceiling was absorptive, and the walls were EXTREMELY reflective. (This helped people to hear the difference between Narrow and Wide mode – an intentional decision on my part… The room looks like a cell for someone in a straight jacket, but the listeners didn’t mind… In fact, many came back for a second listening session after hearing some of the other loudspeakers at the show…)
We spent a while the day before the show doing the Active Room Compensation measurements, and that was it – we were good to go!
The outside of the booth was simple – but the tree of Scan Speak drivers certainly attracted attention – audiophiles like drivers, apparently. :-)
Although it was nice to get out of the listening room in Struer for a while and meet some normal people – after four days on a 8’45” loop, it’s time to head home and listen to nothing for a day or two. :-)
Jeff says:
Audiophiles treat driver selection like fashion, in or out of vogue. They also think it matters a whole lot more than it does, because they tend to believe marketing brochures too much, the word gullible comes to mind. I remember back in the day when I worked in a high end store, the most dreaded person to walk thru the door, one who would bend your ear for hours and argue with you non stop, and then wind up either not buying anything or buying from someone else, was a guy with a dog eared copy of Stereophile or The Absolute Sound in his back pocket.
Barry Santini says:
Amen.
geoff says:
Hi Jeff,
For the most part, the visitors that we had at the Munich show were surprisingly sane. I was expecting a bunch of crazies dropping by to complain about the sound of class-D, digital, jitter, skin effect, the wrong colour of wire, the lack of a cosmic-ray-absorbing-cat on the amplifiers, the fact that we didn’t use wire stands to hold the copper off the floor, etc. etc.
Instead, most people understood the concept of active directivity control in the Beolab 90, and were impressed by the sound.
The Scan-Speak driver tree outside the booth attracted some people. Some of them were other manufacturers who were actually interested in talking to Scan Speak and not to me…
Of course, we did have a couple of people drop by each day to opine or state that they have discovered the meaning of life, the universe, and everything… I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Beolab 90 already has a factory-default startup volume level of 42…
Cheers
-geoff