LOUDSPEAKERS: Does the Totem Mani-2 still rate as one of the ...

Montréal 2006
It seems forever that the Montreal
show has been at the Delta hotel,
right downtown. The Delta was
a great venue for hi-fi companies
looking for solidly-built rooms whose
acoustics you could work with. It wasn’t
so good for those needing vast space,
and the show had long spilled over into
adjacent hotels. This time organizer
Marie-Christine Prin intended to attract
other consumer electronics firms: Sony,
Toshiba, Nikon, perhaps even (snicker!)
Apple Computer. Hence the shift to the
Centre Sheraton, also downtown.
I was the one snickering about Apple,
but guess what…Apple was there.
UHF was not, however. Unlike the
varied hotel rooms at the Delta, the
Sheraton rooms are too small for what
we do. We made up for it (sort of) by
putting a “virtual room” on the Internet,
(complete with a system that could
be seen and examined, if not actually
heard), which remained open through
mid-April. Our absence meant that both
Albert and I had plenty of time to tour.
Albert’s account follows this one.
The official guide to the show, by
the way, had a hopeful photo of a Nikon
ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
Feature
camera, but Nikon wasn’t there. It could
have been worse…imagine Nikon hadn’t
come and Canon had! On the other
hand Sony did have some cameras there,
including the DSC-R1, which Albert and
I had a great demo of. After the show we
bought one…and the product pictures in
this issue (except for the show pictures)
were taken with it.
For several years the show has been
affiliated with a good cause, research
into children's diseases. Proceeds of the
official show CD have gone to that cause.
by Gerard Rejskind
This year the cause also had an official
spokesman, actor Rémy Girard, shown
on this page with Marie-Christine.
Girard will be familiar to worldwide
movie audiences as the man in the hospital
bed in the Oscar-winning film The
Barbarian Invasions.
Did the show’s shift in venue and
orientation pay off? At show’s end
Marie-Christine told me it definitely
had, and I talked to a number of exhibitors
who were ecstatic…the ones in the
large rooms and salons. I also talked to
less happy exhibitors, who had found
the hotel rooms too squeezed, the
entranceways to them too narrow, and
the acoustics…well, it’s a hotel, isn’t it?
I have no idea whether the happy ones
or the unhappy ones predominated.
Notwithstanding the show’s ambitions
to be a sort of mini-CES, this is a
consumer show, not a trade show, and it is
therefore normal for local dealers to be
major exhibitors, albeit with the support
of their suppliers. And thus there were
large rooms backed by such stores as
Audioville, Coup de Foudre and Codell.
Not at the show was the largest of these
dealers, Audio Centre. I had heard before
the show that this suburban store would
move back to its old building (very old,
in fact) to save money. Rumor said that
it was just…gone.
I’ve often deplored that the Totem
Mani-2 loudspeaker (reviewed in this
issue) is never heard at shows. It was there
this time, in the Audioville room (see the
photo at lower right on the next page),
driven by Conrad-Johnson gear. As usually
happens when it is demonstrated,
visitors commented on how amazing it
was to hear a small speaker filling that
huge space.
The official show CD, a music
sampler, is produced by a local high
end recording company, Fidelio. The
company had brought not only its own
CDs but also its Nagra master recorder,
shown on the next page. I got to hear the
master tape of a new percussion SACD
the company was launching. It’s tough
for other exhibitors to compete with
that.