Prices listed in CA$.

This room looked more inviting to me than most other rooms I visited at the show. It looked like a private living room with plenty of space, so people waiting for a seat could just stroll around inside instead of waiting outside in the hallway, which was a relief.

But it’s an audio show. The fact the room was spacious wouldn’t mean a thing if the system in it didn’t sound good. I casually listened to a few tracks, including “Songbird” by Eva Cassidy, while I waited for the middle seat. Once I landed it, I listened more carefully and critically. What played was one of my favourite jazz albums—”Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section”. I know it’s well-recorded so I always have high expectations when it’s played in a demo. It didn’t disappoint. In fact, it exceeded my expectations by the vastness of its soundstage. Pepper’s saxophone solo is hard-panned to the left in the recording, but here it wasn’t stuck to the left speaker but quite further to the left of it, which put the legendary saxophonist almost next to me. The system did the same for the rest of the musicians, creating the effect of these four incredible players surrounding me. It was a big room and full of people but the system’s sound quality delivered the illusion that it was an intimate, private-affair performance played just for me.


The system included a pair of Audiovector R8 Arreté loudspeakers ($92,000), a 200Wpc solid state Moon 761 power amplifier ($18,500), a Moon 791 network player ($21,000), a Naim Uniti Core music server ($3999), with cabling by AudioQuest from its Dragon series.