The Bristol Sound Show - Review

Our award for best sound at the show goes to Harbeth and their Super HL5 plus speakers.
By Sophia Agathangelou: We are more 40.1 types but we enjoyed the intermediate 5s. Alan Shaw kindly played our requests, below is a picture of us together. We thought there were too many skinny/small speakers at the show. The HL5 came first with a respectable 8.5/10. We will be auditioning some 40.1s soon. Alan suggests we ready the dampers. Sounds like the experience we had setting up our famous S100s, that's a good sign.

Alan, (who also has a pair of S100 Spendor), mentioned that he was surprised by a recent survey conducted by his German retail partners that found only 10% of his German customers listened to classical music, his particular preference.


We liked the look of the new 2015 vintage SP100R2's (below) but could only award their sound 7.5/10. I should say that all our points are marked against our own Spendor S100 speakers (the original version of these) which we rate 10/10 the most musical speakers we have ever heard. Obviously set up, room and damping matters.

Musical interlude:
The one that I want. Grease

Ming Da room below 7/10:

Tannoy room below 7/10:

 
The venue, Marriot hotel was well subscribed so we had to share a table for our snack break. We joined Dick, (right) a hobby transmission line maker (speaker cabinets), the sort of thing you might build to accommodate your Tannoy gold's to enhance the base. Nice chap, here's his link for 'affordable high quality custom built speakers'.

We bumped into our friend David from MCRU for some gold Iso-Tek power ends and he began to gush about these anti-seismic speaker bars. ??? Tony who invented them starts going on about the fact that we are living at a constant 1-3 Richter scale earthquake (especially during rush hour and he's got the charts to prove it) and he swears that our speakers are suffering from this. Lol. ...So we just have to spend £1000 on some feet for our speakers!? Dick (above right) had perhaps a better idea, he uses rubber washers under his speakers, he claims with very positive effects. Townshend offer a money back guarantee, does anyone dare us to test them against rubber washers? We would love feedback on these.

We want to be kind and say that Audio Note (below), our previous best sound award at the Cranage event, suffered from a poor room, at least that is what we suspect as they fell far from grace on this occasion. The sound was confused 6.5/10. This highlights the importance of setup and home evaluation of equipment.

Technics coaxial speakers (below) like 'all' the other small speakers at the show fell apart when exposed to our play-list and fair volume.

Over all we were disappointed with the mass of 'housewife lead', so reps told us, skinny and small speakers. Apparently the vast majority of the men who constituted 90% of visitors to the event are subservient to the women in their lives, ...because of female supremacy? I was not the only little girl at the event, but females were a very small minority. My dad said that even the classic Tannoy on show looked dainty and he was pleased that Spendor bucked this trend by presenting their SP100R2s. Apparently vintage and proper sized speakers are a hit in the far east. We think twelve well tuned inches in the base department is a minimum requirement given the state of the art today. ;)

Grapevine update: Not long after the event a little Dickie bird told us that for those Harbeth 40 type lovers there is a new development, something special coming around the corner in the next twelve months or so. We're on the edge of our seats! ;-)

Photos by Sophia Agathangelou.

Text edited by Angelo Agathangelou.

Thanks for reading my review, Sophia Agathangelou age 6.

One of my fave tunes, yes it's Greek: