HifiZine
The enthusiast's audio webzine

The Australian Audio and AV Show 2011

For the past decade, hi-fi shows have been something that Australian audiophiles could only read about. Hence it’s no great surprise that the 2011 Australian Audio and AV show has been so well received. In the week leading up to the show, the last of 50 rooms at the Marriott Hotel were booked. It was a great chance to hear an impressive range of gear all in one location.

Weston Acoustics / Von Schweikert

The show ran for three days, but I went in the day before to help set up the Weston Acoustics / Von Schweikert room. I measured the system response in the listening position to help with speaker placement. The results were highly variable based on position and as expected there was a fair peak around 40 Hz in the sweet spot – a primary room mode based on the length along the listening axis. We tried placing the Von Schweikert speakers as per manufacturer’s recommendations – near the wall with no toe in. This turned out to be less than ideal for a show situation, although we could tell that the speaker was voiced to sound balanced tonally with no toe-in. Greater toe-in widened the sweet spot but also increased brightness. In the end a compromise seemed to work best.

As a nice gesture, Earle Weston provided bottled water free to guests – very welcome considering the rooms were quite warm and there were no other sources of water obtainable except in going back down to the ground floor.

There were no shortage of valve amplifiers at the show, but Earle’s stand out in two ways. While many of the amps at the show take on an aesthetic that almost suggests they are trying to be a solid-state amplifier, Earle’s amps retain a certain charm that befits a hand-made product, with a beautifully finished timber chassis.

At the show Earle ran the system on his Tempest KT 120 monoblocks:

The push-pull 6L6 Troubadour is Earl’s budget amp, intended to tempt buyers away from cheap Chinese imports. While not too much cheaper, the imports have vastly inferior performance and reliability.

Next: the Topaz. According to Earle, this is one of the better sounding and better value amps in the range, at only AUD1495 for the standard EL34 version, although the one shown here is KT120 priced at AUD1995.

The Von Schweikert speakers are a 3-way design with decent sensitivity and very deep bass, due to the low tuned port and rear firing woofer. In the demo room the bass extended lower than I was able to measure – at 15 Hz there was no rolloff! The combination with Earle’s amps worked well and gave a clear indication that valve amps can do bass well. Bass control and output were no problem at all. Many reported that this was one of the better sounding rooms and it was always full.

SGR audio

SGR Audio is an Australian family-owned business with an impressive range of products. Here is Stuart Ralston standing next to the first “Illuminator” loudspeaker ever made:

You probably can’t tell in this photo, but in person you might have noticed bloodshot eyes after a week of 3-hour sleeps. It was a huge challenge getting ready for the show. SGR are extremely busy! When you see their products, it’s not hard to see why. Where possible they use Australian suppliers and the attention to detail is clearly evident in everything they do. Look on the back of their speakers and you see custom made in-house amplifiers – yes, all their speakers are active with analogue crossovers that have been designed in-house. They even make their own heatsinks.

The Illuminator is beautifully made, with a pristine finish over an exotic veneer, the front baffle wrapped in leather. The drivers are the very well-regarded (and expensive) Scan-Speak Illuminators. The subwoofers (8 in total) were supplied by Lorantz Audio. It isn’t common to find speakers that use Australian drivers.

I only had a brief listen to the Illuminators and they certainly did impress. Very neutral and transparent. Most of the time the SGR room was crowded, but I managed to grab a shot when it wasn’t busy.

SGR are located in Melbourne and sell direct. You can hear their speakers in the Melbourne showroom, and for interstate auditions, check their website.

Equinox Audio

Equinox Audio is another family-owned Australian business and it was a good chance to meet designer Rick Stadelmaier.

Walking into their room it was immediately apparent that they went to more effort than others to get the room to behave.

Just that little bit of extra effort taken to treat the room certainly did pay off. I was able to sit down and appreciate the speakers without having my impressions tainted by a poor room.

I sat down with one of my reference CDs for a good listen. The sound was clean, neutral, and detailed. Bass wasn’t out of control as in many of the other rooms. The combination of a high-end soft dome tweeter with metal cone drivers worked very well.

Osborn Loudspeakers

DIYers will recognise the drivers used in the Osborn Loudspeakers range, as they are well-regarded units. I didn’t get a chance to have a good listen, but I was impressed with the prices that they were offering, considering the high quality drivers used in large and very well-built cabinets. Osborn tend to confirm my belief that Australian speaker manufacturers offer great value products.

Cabasse

Ask just about anyone which rooms they preferred, and the Cabasse room is almost certain to come up.

What you see here is a 4-way digital active speaker based around a coaxial point source driver arrangement. You can see a dome tweeter with a midrange and lower midrange driver. There is also a 15″ woofer behind (not visible).

I do regret not spending more time in this room, as it was one of the best sounding rooms at the show.

Kyron Audio

Kyron Audio is an Australian company that had previously made only custom speakers. The Gaia is their first non-custom speaker and it was one of the most talked-about speakers at the show.

The Gaia is an open-baffle speaker that has no baffle at all for the woofers. It’s also a digital active speaker with sophisticated digital speaker and room correction – the Australian-designed DEQX.

The sound was quite spectacular – flawless, airy, detailed. I could not fault it. I didn’t notice any room issues at all in this room, which could be related to the open-baffle design as well as the digital correction.

Leon’s business partner Lee Gray is an industrial designer — and it shows in the creation of a speaker that is both stylish in appearance and superlative in performance.

WAR audio

The room from Perth-based W.A.R. Audio room featured a speaker designed by Pat O’Brien, and was one of the most popular at the show.

The speaker features Accuton ceramic drivers and a ribbon tweeter, and is available as a kit or fully-assembled. The sound of this speaker was beautifully detailed and magically refined. There isn’t much that else I can say, it was simply a great accurate speaker with nothing to complain about.

VAF Research

Phillip Vafiadis of VAF Research put on the best demonstration of the show. The VAF room was always full. He played a reference track first on their smallest speaker seen on the left, the Signature i90, which is a compact coaxial point-source driver. He described it as the smallest a lifestyle speaker can be without serious compromise. Next up we heard “Soundwall” which uses the same driver mounted on a wall – that is the red print you see behind Phillip in the photo below.

The sound was very similar. Then the Signature i93, their top-of-the-range speaker. There was a nice mix of technical information and demo. All three speakers sounded very good indeed.

Other noteworthy rooms

Martin Logan (Advance Audio Australia)

There was something very natural about these Martin Logan Electrostatic speakers. The sound was “just there.” There was something “unhi-fi” about their sound. Many speakers seemed a little artifical in their sense of airiness, while these had a more realistic balance.

Vivid Audio

Beautifully made speakers with some of the best bass I heard at the show. However, on the tracks that I heard, I felt they were just a little clinical in nature.

Genelec

Genelec need no introduction in the studio world. They make very well regarded active studio monitors. The speakers shown above are active speakers with a waveguide loaded dome tweeter. The larger unit is a 3-way speaker. You can’t tell from this photo, and even up close in the flesh it is hard to tell, but it features a coaxial driver where part of the waveguide is actually a midrange driver that doesn’t have a surround. The Genelec speakers had very solid bass and a dynamic sound although they did also have a slightly forward nature.

B&W and Classe

I’m a long-time admirer of the B&W 800 series and in this room they were powered by Classe electronics. It was a short demo but on the music played they were very dynamic, clean and accurate. While I thought this room sounded very good, many others were less than impressed.

Pure Music Group (PMG)

Some large JBL monitors were played in the Pure Music Group room.

When I introduced myself to Warwick Freemantle, he asked me about the kind of music I like. With PMG, it’s all about the music. There was another room with JBL speakers, but the two rooms were worlds apart in sound. This one was far better. A very nice sound indeed. Typical complaints about horns weren’t evident here.

Magneplanar speakers

There were Maggies in two different rooms and both performed very well. I believe that one of them is priced around $3k and I agree with comments made by many that they are value champions. They held up very well against much more expensive speakers. My only complaint is that they sounded as if they had an exaggerated amount of treble detail. In this aspect, the Martin Logan speakers had a more natural balance.

Aktimate

Aktimate had the cheapest speakers I saw at the show and they had very respectable performance. This pair had surprising bass – an ideal choice for a good quality PC setup.

Sound Labs Group

Sound Labs crammed a great deal of gear into their room since they have such a large range. Their Audel speakers — shown below — were beautifully made. The room was crowded and very popular. I didn’t get a chance to have much of a listen, and arrived in the room towards the end of the show looking for photos.

Concluding remarks

The Australian Hifi show hopefully represents the beginning of a new trend in the local industry. It offered an opportunity for people to experience some very high-end equipment without any pressure to buy. It also offered increased exposure for some boutique products that many people will not have had a chance to hear about. When asked about their favourite rooms, Kyron, Cabasse and W.A.R. Audio were mentioned frequently. Those three rooms had exceptional performance.

A show environment presents considerable challenges to exhibitors. Arguably the biggest challenge was that people were spoilt for choice. There was so much to see that the tendency was to give each room a very brief amount of time to impress. I observed many people leave a room in 20 seconds if they didn’t like the music that was playing at the time. I even noticed my own impressions being biased by the music that was playing at the time. The better regarded rooms typically had well-chosen music that showed off the system well. The rooms were small and not well-designed for audio reproduction. As a result, some suffered from this more than others. Overall the show was well organised and well received and I hope that it will be the first of many more.