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Bruce Edgar room was probably the only rooms at the entire show where form my prospective it was possible to begin to talk about "pure audio", so I will.

Bruce picked and smartly holds at "The Show" a wondefull room, the small room, but free form the typical bass problems and he loaded into it a lot of bass. This room can actually absorb bass and if you even dump into this room even extra 3-6dB at LF it still sound very nice.

Bruce Edgar brought up his big 3 ways horns (I believe he call them Titans) and a mono folded EQed LF section (I do not know the trade name). The LF was powered by some SS amps from ToyUSA and the horns were powered by Cy Brenneman small SET, built around KT-88, that looked larger to me then they should be. The non-interesting digital front-end was use. There was also a TT in there but I did not listen it.

The system was kind of major overkill for a room of that size but not for this room. The room was loaded very nice and responded very well. Furthermore, the room satisfactorily responded at any singly location where I was. I had no problems to listen the playback staying next to the speakers: it did all, necessary tonal deviation but still responded qute ambianic and musical, without too much losing of tonal and contrast discrimination. In other words: it was very-very lucky room.

I have listened the same setup last year and in the very same room.  Last year Cy used his bigger amp,  (I think Bruce should still to work on an amp selection) this year amp has a lot of upper bass problems but it was unspeakably better at the higher octaves. In fact I was very-very positively surprised how good HF Cy and Bruce managed to get out of thier system.  Ironically Bruce uses the Fane tweeters that I never considered interesting but they did perfectly fine in Edgar's system. Last year with the Cy’s 845 amp the HF had some nervousness and has some problems to be handled by the room. This year it was flawless. The HF is usual problem at the shows: unknown components, electricity, cables, mostly crappy industry standard tweeters and so on. The Bruce’s room was from a stand point of HF as good as it might be. It would be interesting to learn how Bruce used those Fanes.

Anyhow...

All together the system sound OK, yeas there were some problems, but still it sounded OK. Bruce kindly allowed me and some of people that I pulled into the room to play some our music and despite that we played some very demanding material the system swallowed it very effortless and quite "musical" (in the most loaded definition of this word)

About the problems of that installation. The room size – it was too small and had too short decay time. That is why Bruce was able to go away with obviously higher then necessary level of subwoofer and a very cheesy LF amplifier. If you place the same system in a larger room and add a second LF module (outside of the soundstage as it should be) then the miserable quality of that little SS fart machine will be well audible. Also, I feel that the bass amp use too sharp filter. In the small room it was OK but in a larger room it will be amusical. Bruce used very inexpensive MF drivers but to my surprise they do not sound so bad. I sincerely feel that the very proper and "smart" use of that tweeter made a good contribution to a way in which the MF performed. The biggest problem of the entire system was the upper mid bass – form my point of view the most important element of audio reproduction.  Last year, with 845 amps it was better then this year but still “not there”. This year the upper bass was even worth. Bruce, I do not knowingly of not, masked-out his upper bass by adding too much lower bass (and the room very nicely spread it around). I meant to ask Bruce to shut down the subwoofer for a second and to hear the horns "as is" but we played too good musik to make those experiments.

(To describe how the Edgar’s upper bass sounded I would give you an association: pretend that you have a collection of different colors and you are about to paint something on a canvas. For whatever reason you decided to reduce the intensity of the colors. You may add some water to the colors and make the more “pastel” but you added to all of them some white paint and instead of reducing the color’s intensity you reduced thier effectiveness. So, the Bruce upper bass sounded to me as a poly-colored picture with a severe deduction of distinctive differentiation between the colors by the “white-anisarion” of each color, and with a sever domination of purple and darkish-gray tones.)

There were some other problems but altogether it was quite illustrative that Bruce Edgar knew what he was doing and that he was in a fruitful direction. Considering that the system cost very inexpensive (a fraction of what many of other speakers cost) it still produced qute acceptable result. Put in that system a properly built none-forded upper bass horn with a good driver, add another sub, introduce a better bass amp (preferably the same amp the drives the horn), naturally EQ everything in the room and you might get very-very fine result out of those Titans or whatever thier name is. However, even “as is” the playback in that room presented a very nice “Audio Shows Survival Kit” that allows for little money, little efforts and with irrelevant associated component to get a quite satisfactory Sound.

Anyhow, the Edgar’s room was probably the room at the Show where might use some complementary language and non-insulting adjectives. Was it “The Best Room at the Show”. Nope, I do not know what it means. However, the Edgar’s room was a wonderful educational playground what people do out there… There was the only one other room at the Vegas that made me to think more about sound then the Bruce Edgar’s room and that “impressed and moved me”… I am sure I will mention about it sometime later on

So long for now,
Romy the Cat

To be continue…

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