2001 HiFi Expo

This May found me working again for Merlin Music Systems at the two rooms they participated in at the 2001 HiFi Exposition in New York City. Being born and raised just north of "the city" (as anyone who lives near or is from there refers to it as), it has been several years since I've had a chance to spend some time there. While billed as a show for both HiFi and Home Theater, I was pleasantly surprised at the large number of plain old 2 channel HiFi enthusiasts that turned out for this show and the great response we received at the show. To all of those who came to the show and visited our (Merlin's) rooms, many thanks for the plethora of positive comments we received.

What was really interesting for me and my pal Bobby Palkovic (President and chief designer at Merlin) was that we were able to show off how well the new Merlin VSM Millennium speakers work with both tube and solid state gear. You see, we were feeling that Merlin VSMs were getting the rep that went along the lines of "You have to use tubes with Merlins to get them to sound good..." which we felt with the Millennium series of speakers was not the case. We set out to prove our point that this was not so at this show. The room above featured JPS Labs cabling throughout and tube electronics from Joule-Electra (LA-100 line stage preamp and VZN-100 OTL monoblock power amplifiers) with the (tube output) Audio Aero Captiole 24/192 CD player. Right next door was our good friends at SimAudio (see picture at left featuring Lionel Goodfield of SimAudio) demonstrating the same Merlin VSM Millennium speakers (sans premium finish) with their all solid state system (Eclipse CD Player, P-5 preamp, W-5 power amplifier) which was fully wired with all Cardas Audio cables. Both rooms had the same speaker and room treatment set-up. Both systems sounded excellent, but different with many folks preferring one room and many preferring the other! Now, I don't need to remind you folks that I am your friendly authorized retailer for ALL this great gear that was shown in both of these rooms! ;-)

Because I was working at this show and we were so busy with the two rooms, I did not get a chance to go around and see much, but I did run into a few friends like Coleman Brice (left in the picture below) from Classic Records. Between awesome single sided 45rpm LP sets and the Led Zep LPs they have been reissuing, I've been getting allot of pleasure from my vinyl front end lately.

I just had to put this picture in here of proud new
father, Vince Stables (on left in picture below) of
SimAudio with fellow SimAudio-er Lionel Goodfield.

Happy Listening,
Rich Brkich
Owner, Signature Sound