Tír Na HiFi

Thanks James. It sounds like a typical hifi show! Is this a new venture? It might take a while to get established.

Thanks again...

i was there on Saturday along with a few other inmates.

There were quite a few rooms, which was good, but people attending were pretty thin on the ground alright. There was one fella selling records outside the downstairs rooms. People were friendly and welcoming, happy to chat - similar story with the guy in the MBL room that James mentioned. However, all rooms were too loud, and pretty much all of them sounded hard, some systems which I know are not hard... well even they sounded harsh.

Rooms are hard to set up for sure, and in every room, one wall was glass which can't have helped. In another you could here the resonance across the room. So all in all, I don't think the sounds heard matched the quality of the equipment they had on show. Honorable mention to a room with MBL amps/source and Kudos 505 speakers for probably sounding the best of the lot to my ears. But other rooms hardly looked set up at all. One had some quite expensive speakers and amps (25k for pre, power and speakers) right up against one wall of the room, and a curve of chairs about 5M away at the opposite end of the room. Just a really strange choice for a setup.

Anyway, kudos to them for getting it together and managing to put on a show, it cannot be easy to mount the capital and co-ordination needed to get it all up and running.

Fran

Thanks Fran.

Many thanks for all the comments. I got the impression that this show was very similar to the one in Clayton Hotel, Dublin, last year: very good systems, with great potential, unfortunately placed in poor rooms, with minimal or no control at all of the room acoustic. When I was in Italy I remember that most of the distributors would use a variety of devices to absorb/reflect sound waves and correct at best the environment: tube traps, absorbing panels, Helmholtz traps... And even using such tools some room was still very poor. But at least they tried to demonstrate the full potential of the system.
During the Dublin show I was surprised to see so many speakers firing directly at the knees of the listeners rather than at their ears.

Best