Koss 76 manual Montréal

FEATURE

MONTRÉAL 2006

This year the cause also had an official spokesman, actor Rémy Girard, shown on this page with Marie-Christine. Girard will be familiar to worldwide movie audiences as the man in the hos- pital bed in the Oscar-winning film The Barbarian Invasions.

Did the show’s shift in venue and orientation pay off? At show’s end Marie-Christine told me it definitely had, and I talked to a number of exhibi- tors who were ecstatic…the ones in the large rooms and salons. I also talked to less happy exhibitors, who had found the hotel rooms too squeezed, the entranceways to them too narrow, and the acoustics…well, it’s a hotel, isn’t it? I have no idea whether the happy ones or the unhappy ones predominated.

Notwithstanding the show’s ambi- tions to be a sort of mini-CES, this is a consumer show, not a trade show, and it is therefore normal for local dealers to be

It seems forever that the Montreal show has been at the Delta hotel, right downtown. The Delta was a great venue for hi-fi companies

looking for solidly-built rooms whose acoustics you could work with. It wasn’t so good for those needing vast space, and the show had long spilled over into adjacent hotels. This time organizer Marie-Christine Prin intended to attract other consumer electronics firms: Sony, Toshiba, Nikon, perhaps even (snicker!) Apple Computer. Hence the shift to the Centre Sheraton, also downtown.

I was the one snickering about Apple, but guess what…Apple was there.

UHF was not, however. Unlike the varied hotel rooms at the Delta, the Sheraton rooms are too small for what we do. We made up for it (sort of) by putting a “virtual room” on the Inter- net, (complete with a system that could be seen and examined, if not actually heard), which remained open through mid-April. Our absence meant that both Albert and I had plenty of time to tour. Albert’s account follows this one.

The official guide to the show, by the way, had a hopeful photo of a Nikon

22 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine

camera, but Nikon wasn’t there. It could have been worse…imagine Nikon hadn’t come and Canon had! On the other hand Sony did have some cameras there, including the DSC-R1, which Albert and I had a great demo of. After the show we bought one…and the product pictures in this issue (except for the show pictures) were taken with it.

For several years the show has been affiliated with a good cause, research into children's diseases. Proceeds of the official show CD have gone to that cause.

by Gerard Rejskind

major exhibitors, albeit with the support of their suppliers. And thus there were large rooms backed by such stores as Audioville, Coup de Foudre and Codell. Not at the show was the largest of these dealers, Audio Centre. I had heard before the show that this suburban store would move back to its old building (very old, in fact) to save money. Rumor said that it was just…gone.

I’ve often deplored that the Totem Mani-2 loudspeaker (reviewed in this issue) is never heard at shows. It was there this time, in the Audioville room (see the photo at lower right on the next page), driven by Conrad-Johnson gear. As usu- ally happens when it is demonstrated, visitors commented on how amazing it was to hear a small speaker filling that huge space.

The official show CD, a music sampler, is produced by a local high end recording company, Fidelio. The company had brought not only its own CDs but also its Nagra master recorder, shown on the next page. I got to hear the master tape of a new percussion SACD the company was launching. It’s tough for other exhibitors to compete with that.