TAVES Day 3

I’m back in Los Angeles. I packed up the few remaining discs that I didn’t sell and loaded up my Oppo and Benchmark playback system about 1 pm yesterday and headed for Buffalo. The trip was relatively uneventful…other than the crying baby across the aisle on the first leg of the flight, the curse of the middle seat because I checked in late, and the most unpleasant Southwest flight attendant that I’ve ever encountered (she didn’t give me any trouble but boy did she lay into anyone that headed to the front restroom before the person using the facilities had returned to their seat!). Relax lady!

Thanks to Benjamin Franklin (I think) for the very timely return from daylight savings time to standard time. It worked out perfectly yesterday morning as I let the Airbnb place that we had rented and headed for the Sheraton…I really needed the time to pack and get everything ready for the trip back to LAX. But when I arrived at my sales table around 9:30 am, there were already people waiting for me to uncover the DVDs and Blu-ray discs. It’s never like that on Sundays. The traffic on the last day of the TAVES Show was much better than I had expected. I was kind of sad that I had to stop selling things hours early. I should check with Todd and see if the heavy traffic continued for the remainder of the afternoon. I guess it was all for the best…I only had about a dozen Blu-rays left by early afternoon. Thanks to the organizers and especially all of the audio enthusiasts that came by to say hello and purchase a disc or two. I’ll definitely be back to Toronto next year.

Notable things from Sunday:

I was introduced to a fellow Ph.D on Saturday. I don’t have his card in front of me but his area of expertise is psychoacoustics. Apparently, he writes a blog (he said he has 160,000 readers!) and does consulting work for people wanting better sound. He stopped back by on Sunday to let me know that he had listened to the HD-Audio 2013 sampler the previous evening on his sytem. He described the sound as, “freakishly amazing!” That’s a new one. I get a lot of “blown away” and I told him that but he insisted that he was more than blown away. He was completely amazed by what he heard. I told him that I’m out to conquer the world one set of ears at a time. I won another convert with this guy…who’s also named Mark.

Then there was the guy that wanted to push my buttons about the new PS Audio component that converts everything you put in it into DSD (a completely ridiculous idea if you ask any competent audio designer). I wasn’t going there. Even if you prefer the sound of what DSD does to accurately recorded audio or believe the “science” behind it…I simply can’t support any box that requires me to adopt a specific technology because of someone else’s personal preferences. I don’t require people to listen to a “stage” perspective mix of my recordings by removing the standard 2-channel stereo version or the “audience” 5.1 mix. I’m hoping that people will try the “stage” mixes but I wouldn’t mandate that choice. It’s like there’s a DSD police out to enforce their narrow vision of great audio.

This is what PS Audio does with their new processor. There were a couple of other curious attendees at the table as I explained the history of DSD, why it equals ideal CD fidelity and no more, the fact that there are no tools to produce natively in DSD, and that virtually everyone uses PCM to make their recordings…even people that support and release DSD tracks. The debate is part of the passion that audiophiles enjoy. Maybe I should take one of my 96 kHz/24-bit PCM tracks and downconvert it to DSD 64 and let people compare them.

It was a great final day in Toronto…my final show until the CES event in January. There’s another Techzone this year and I’m being pestered to sign up. I’ll have to crowdsource another $5K to make it happen. But it’s a ways off.