At least one room was making a serious effort to create a bigger splash. Billed as a €3,500,000+ system, German distributor Audio Reference GmbH combined the Wilson Audio WAMM speakers and Subsonic subwoofers, with Nordost Gold cabling, D’Agostino’s biggest and glitziest electronics, Stromtank’s S-500 High Power MKII power conditioner, a dCS Vivaldi Apex stack and (just to raise the price level) a full complement of VPI turntable, arm, cartridge and phono section that never got to play.
The room was promoted as the most expensive at the show. In other words, it offered endless opportunities for those who wished to take selfies and/or post them to social media, photos of themselves stood in front of a collection of unfeasibly expensive loot. The downside, of course, is the number of attendees left wandered about the show and wondering what all that glitz added up to. Sadly, the answer was a lot less than met the eye…
Demonstrations were tightly scheduled, scripted and 15-minutes long. It quickly became obvious that this was an exercise in shock and awe over delicacy. Having heard the WAMMs at David Wilson’ home, played with (considerably) less costly supporting equipment, we know that the speaker does delicacy and does it well. As well as it does dimensionality and spatial/temporal coherence: none of which was on show amidst the fireworks and musical detonations on display here. This demonstration featured one familiar classical piece, but then went straight for the jugular, especially with a male vocal that seemed to be promoting improvements to the human voice made possible by AI and ending with Dave Brubeck’s Take 5 played by a big band. You couldn’t fault the dynamics, but in most other respects the presentation was exaggerated, lacked any sense of depth and sounded very digital. On top of that, because of the lack of synergy, the whole fell well short of the parts.
At least some of that is down to the room in which the system was set up. When we heard the WAMM MCs we had the advantage of doing it in DAW’s listening room, the room in which they were developed. This was no Wilson-esque room. Instead, the system sat in a lecture theatre, complete with stepped seating. Given that one of the key parameters in the WASP approach to speaker positioning and optimization, is the ear height of the seated listener, and their distance from the speakers, there was obviously no way this system was ever going to deliver anything like its potential performance.
All of which begs the question, who on earth thought this was a good idea – and why didn’t they know better? Here was a massively expensive system that was totally humbled by the one in the VTL room, where the Alexx V (sans-subs) and driven by the new Lohengrin amps, TP-6.5 phono-stage and TL-7.5, from a Kuzma Stabi R/Safir 9/Lyra Etna SL combination, displayed all of the musical and expressive qualities that were so obviously lacking in the bigger rig. The problem here is that in promoting the WAMM-based system as the best-of- the-best – and then failing to deliver so catastrophically, Audio Reference simply delivered ammunition to those who belittle high-end audio and its claimed benefits. This display of hubris did little to advance the cause of the distributor, even less to advance the cause of high-end audio in general.
