Lone Star Audio Fest (was "Fort Worth, Texas")

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Hi Everyone , I am looking for fellow Audiophiles, Music lovers, and diy audio guys in the Fort Worth, and Dallas, Texas area, who want to meet new people to get together to talk about Audio equipment, and Music !!! - Maybe a Audio Club can be formed in our area ! - Kind Regards, Dean
 
I will be bringing some moderate quantities of beer as well. Some of the stuff we'll play will sound familiar to you. :D We're just going to set up a system, listen to music, talk circuits, and drink beer, nothing fancy planned. I think Pete's bringing some Jordan speakers and a few amps and preamps, I'll have a Heretical and an RLD MkII.

He made fun of me for not trying to cram my oddball M3.3s into my Hyundai for the drive up.
 
Fun show. Shared a room with Pete, who had a pretty exotic headphone collection and a pile of Apex headphone amps. The Jordans has a tight sweet spot, but sounded very nice there. Surprising amont of bass- the small room helped. Ted Paisley had some very fancy power cords and interconnects. And we had a keg of Live Oak Schwarzbier.

My personal highlights:

- Seeing old friends and getting to meet some forum guys FTF for the first time, like kenpeter, zobsky, and the late, great Jocko.

- A very mixed bag, soundwise. One interesting room was Raven; they were in a large meeting room, and for speakers, had ginormous towers with a line of ribbon or leaf tweeters. If you were right in the sweet spot, the imaging was amazing. One foot out of it, nope. It all sounded quite effortless driven by their tubed electronics.

- The Dutch electrostatics with metallized diaphragms (can't remember the brand) that showed there last year were here again. They're just too damn big for that tiny room. It was miraculous that they sounded as good as they did. I'd love to hear them in an appropriate room.

- One that will remain nameless was an amazingly elaborate setup that defined everything I don't like in "hifi" sound. They had spent a lot of effort in treating their room, the speakers and electronics all looked terrific, and the sound was clinically, spotlessly clean. But they sounded like electronic reproducers, no sense of spirit in them. It was like those overly-vivid Japanese art photographs from 30 years ago, where the color intensity was tweaked up to be more vivid than life. I wish I could define better What Went Wrong (easier with the more obviously flawed speakers), but they were actively annoying to listen to.

- I'm still not convinced by single drivers. Some of them were quite nice, but with really obvious issues. The Lowther systems all sounded different but all sounded like Lowthers. As I said before, the Jordans were nice, Uriah Dailey's Fostex were a different kind of nice. There were a lot of variations on those themes, and some large co-axials as well. But nothing that makes me want to live with them. Yet.

- There are reliable madmen. The king of them all is Dave Slagle. Three fabulous microbrews on tap, Rahsaan Roland Kirk or the turntable, field coil drivers and (my longtime fave) a Panasonic strain gauge cartridge. Two tonearms, which inadvertently had a close encounter. Dave played Audio Evel Knievel by hot-plugging phono stage tubes without bothering to turn down the volume. Freaky fun.

- Unlike my modern PC laptop, the 7 year old Apple laptop I'm now using for music performed flawlessly. The software is a bit clumsy (I'll eventually get it sorted), and the OS and user interface are, for me, totally non-intuitive, but playback was clean and totally devoid of the pops, clicks, dropouts, and hiccups to which my PC laptop is prone. I think I paid about $150 for it in perfectly clean, refurbished condition.

- Pete was assured that he was "Internet famous."
 
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Sounds like fun SY. Wish I could have been there. How busy was it this year?

Oh yeah, you forgot to mention that there was an ongoing diyAudio project there, the Manzantia Open Baffle. Don't know if you heard it or liked it, but it's probably the only speaker there that has its own thread. :)
 
What I saw at the show was pretty much what I see every year.


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John
 
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