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Feature
by Gerard Rejskind
Destination: Montreal
It’s always fun to talk to foreign visitors
to Montreal’s annual Festival
du Son et de l’Image. People such as
Parasound’s Richard Schram, who
was here for the first time. Or Jadis’
Patrick Calmettes, shown above with
his JD I MkII CD transport. Or Cyrus’s
Peter Bartlett. They’re used to attending
(ho hum!) local shows, and they clearly
weren’t expecting what this has become:
a world class venue, one of the world’s top
audio and video shows.
We were there, as usual, with elements
of our reference systems, plus a
pair of borrowed speakers, the Living
Voice Avatars reviewed elsewhere in this
issue. We were kept busy through the
show — check out the lineup for tickets
on the next page!
Still, I did get to see and hear at least
a fraction of gear in the many dozens
of rooms. Including the Jadis transport,
gorgeously finished in what I took to be
exotic wood. It is actually a synthetic
material hand-painted by artists. There
are of course no two alike. The Jadis
room in general sounded very nice.
26 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
And check out who was greeting visitors:
above right. Jadis was represented
by Pierre Gabriel, and Gabriel is of
course an archangel, so…
I saw but didn’t get to hear the Hurricane
amplifier shown below. It sure has
a lot of KT88 output tubes, and even so
it’s a monoblock! A pair of these 200 watt
powerhouses costs C$6500.
Oracle is back, with the original
designer, Jacques Riendeau, at its head.
Jacques was showing his
new (relatively) low-cost
Stello components,
in sculpted
s t a i n le s s
s t e e l ,
plus the
prototype
of a new
speaker he hopes to bring to market
soon.
Though some very good rooms
offered low-key intimate sound, the
monk-like Cabasse Kara (next page)
projected an image that was larger than
life, and certainly impressive. These