Bristol Sound and Vision Show

[Ray P]

I managed to get to the Bristol show yesterday and had the good fortune to enjoy a little conversation with John (aka Dr John), Lee (lilolee), Richard (Higgins), Shane and Peter - thankyou gents.

I spent a few hours visiting the various rooms and have to say that I was completely underwhelmed. Even allowing for the environment the sound quality being achieved in most rooms was almost universally poor. The intention was clearly to create an immediate impact, which many achieved, but just a few minutes left me with negative impressions such as 'strained', 'forced' and 'congested'.

Exceptions? There were just a couple of rooms where I had extended listens and came away with more positive views. Strangely they were both using tube amps.

The Living Voice room had a good sound that I could live with. They were using their high(ish) efficiency speakers driven by some Kondo amps, 300B tubes as I recall.

The other good room was World Design's. Peter's WD25A speakers were sounding very good, fed by Greg's 300B amp (source was a 401 TT and a CD player that I didn't note the lineage of). The sound was so much more 'organic' than most other rooms.

Peter also had a small discrete poster on the wall in the room, listing future World Design offerings. Unfortunately I didn't write the list down but it included a floor-standing version of the WD25 speakers, a power amp and a phono stage. He also mentioned that he is making good progress with buying the parts from WAD.

Ray