Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2004 - A Photo Report, Part 3
by Dave and Carol Clark

The Hudson Audio room featured Skylan racks and stands which were very attractive and well-built. The diminutive Omega speakers offered a nice and seductive sound that belied their size while being driven by Opera Audio electronics.

The Omega speaker ($399 a pair).

The Audiokits room featured lots of kits (designed by Erno Borbely), though in this case they were already finished and ready to be making music. Lots to see and look at, but no music was playing. I found this a in several rooms at the show—nice room, people milling around, no music. Too bad as the room looked very promising based on the designer's reputation.

The Audiokits room with finished amplifiers and preamplifiers—but nice and quiet.

The Vivaldi room showed off the Lowther based full-range speakers. Very nice design that looked as good as it sounded. Not quite full-range, but it did offer a credible sound that was musical and fairly extended for a Lowther horn based speaker.

Lots of Lowthers to make the music.

Using Doc B.'s new S.E.X. (single ended experimenter's) kit. The S.E.X. is a stereo integrated single ended triode (SET) amplifier of 2 watts per channel output.

The BIX turntable from Bottlehead turned more than one head that I know of... $769 with Rega 2 arm in kit form. Stunning looks and sonics, say... how you do it for so little scratch?

The Seduction phono-preamplifier. Very seductive... Carol can I have a minute to myself....

Hey Ronnie... I said a minute! Ronnie Caplan the man.

Colorado Sound and Design showed the classic table from Oracle with a Tri-Planar arm—way too cool! And they actually were playing music—uh, I meant LPs!

Colorado Sound and Design used Alon speakers (no sorry I mean Nola speakers) and in this case they are renamed Vipers. Always enjoyed the sound from Alon's speakers (Nola!!) and this was just as enjoyable as ever. Electronics used were either Manley, Cary, or Sophia, with Berendsen digital front-ends. Cabling was by Soundstring.

The Kharmas doing their thang with Manley amplifiers. This was a bigger room with three systems in a sort of C-shape. The music sounded quite good and from the hall, was a drawing force to deal with, with so many rooms to visit.

DejaVu 18 watt stereo amp, push pull design using Sofia 300bs. The amp is made by Vu from Deja Vu Audio in Virginia and was making pretty good music with the Kharmas through Soundstring cables.

The new Cruz digital amplifier, and from their site... "Abstract of this Cruz exclusive patent. An improved power amplifier having complimentary power transistors connected in push-pull arrangement, and having a bias voltage source coupled to the transistors for generating a transverse idling current, flowing through the complementary pair of transistors. A regulating, feedback control circuit, has a set point input and inputs connected to precision resistors, connected to detect the current through the power transistors and the output current. Analogue arithmetic computing circuits, continuously compute the instantaneous difference between the detected transverse idling current through the power transistors and the set point input for the idling current. The output of the controller circuit is connected to the bias voltage sources to vary the bias voltage in proportion to the instantaneous difference between the detected transverse idling current and the set value of idling current, to maintain a constant, transverse idling current." Interesting.... but how does it sound? Sorry, static display... though they had one set up with some Dali Euphonia speakers off to the side, it was never playing music. Shucks!

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