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Part 1/4
This post is going to be a little different from what I usually write. This event is mostly for 2-channel speaker audiences, similar to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest or AXPONA, so my impressions of the setups here don't quite belong on the personal audio Head-Fi forums. However, I think it might be an interesting read, and more of a visual experience for a fun browse-through post.
The Pacific Audio Fest has been around for a few years now. I was at AXPONA last year when I first heard about it from a flyer that was at one of the exhibitor's rooms. This year, I was visiting Seattle for Father's Day, and my time there happened to be in-line with one of the days of the event. I was lucky to be a part of Audeze's e-mailing list because otherwise I would have never known the event was during my stay in Seattle. I only brought my 85mm lens with me on this trip, so most of the photos here are not whole-room photos.
Normally I register for these events in advanced, but since this was a last-minute add-on to my trip, I was too late for the online one-day pass sale.
The hotel area itself is quite charming: the surrounding area has a lot of Evergreen trees, the hotel has a lot of wood crossbeams along the ceiling, and the myriad of branched hallways have a very open architecture with lots of windows to allow natural light to come through. I've never been in a hotel quite like this one before. Upon checking in at the registration table, I had to spend a few minutes looking at the map to understand the layout of the event. The map wasn't quite as linear as say RMAF, AXPONA, or CanJam events, so I kind of just walked around the venue without going anywhere in particular.
I will say, the Marketplace area of these 2-channel events are really cool to browse through just because they usually have a variety of music-related things to purchase, not just audio equipment. This is a music-oriented industry after all, so I've made a few purchases from these areas in the past including vinyl records, high-quality 2L BluRay audio discs, specialty format CDs including SACDs, etc. I hope Head-Fi can have a similar type of area in the future as the events grow.
The rest of these posts will be more of a visual browse-through of some of the photos I took at the event. Overall though, I had a great time at this event. Although these types of conventions weren't around when I first got into the hobby, it's great to see them happening more often in more places these days. Even if it's not a personal audio convention like the CanJam events, or mini Head-Fi meets, I'd recommend attending one just to experience it. It's not your typical convention, and if you're reading this on Head-Fi, you're already interested in high-end audio systems.
This post is going to be a little different from what I usually write. This event is mostly for 2-channel speaker audiences, similar to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest or AXPONA, so my impressions of the setups here don't quite belong on the personal audio Head-Fi forums. However, I think it might be an interesting read, and more of a visual experience for a fun browse-through post.
Back in 2010, I was originally looking for a better set of headphones to use while listening to music from my iPod Touch in my undergrad years. I came across Head-Fi threads comparing the Beats by Dr. Dre Studio to the Audio Technica ATH-M50.
The landscape of personal audio was vastly different then than what it is now. Apple Stores and Guitar Centers were really the only two places where I could demo headphones, and Head-Fi was a unifying place where impressions of audio gear could be found. Discord didn't exist back then, Reddit wasn't nearly as popular as it is today, and other audio forums weren't as big.
I started posting on Head-Fi in 2011 and to this day, I think getting into this hobby of audio has greatly impacted my life, both academically, and personally. For instance, I got into photography directly because of this hobby upon seeing others post beautiful photos of audio gear in written reviews. Because of this hobby, I am still very much interested in the biology of hearing and how hearing loss is irreversible in humans.
I lived in Seattle for most of my life, and the Head-Fi community there was a place where I could connect with other like-minded individuals in-person.
I moved to SoCal in 2016 for further education and have been in the area since then for work. This hobby of high-end audio has also evolved since moving there: my involvement in the hobby has been less gear-driven and more community-focused. I've had the opportunity to:
Fast forward to today and looking back on this hobby, a lot has changed since I first got involved:
It's crazy to see how the industry has changed over the years. Back in 2012 when I was first starting to attend the small local Head-Fi meets in library conference rooms, I never thought I would attend the convention-like events such as CanJam because such events weren't around in Seattle at the time, and it's really cool to see them happening here now.
The landscape of personal audio was vastly different then than what it is now. Apple Stores and Guitar Centers were really the only two places where I could demo headphones, and Head-Fi was a unifying place where impressions of audio gear could be found. Discord didn't exist back then, Reddit wasn't nearly as popular as it is today, and other audio forums weren't as big.
I started posting on Head-Fi in 2011 and to this day, I think getting into this hobby of audio has greatly impacted my life, both academically, and personally. For instance, I got into photography directly because of this hobby upon seeing others post beautiful photos of audio gear in written reviews. Because of this hobby, I am still very much interested in the biology of hearing and how hearing loss is irreversible in humans.
I lived in Seattle for most of my life, and the Head-Fi community there was a place where I could connect with other like-minded individuals in-person.
I moved to SoCal in 2016 for further education and have been in the area since then for work. This hobby of high-end audio has also evolved since moving there: my involvement in the hobby has been less gear-driven and more community-focused. I've had the opportunity to:
- Help out at CanJam and other audio events around the USA
- Attend the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (before it ended in 2020) and other similar audio conventions
- Meet a lot of cool people in the hobby from other areas of the world, and keep in touch with them
Fast forward to today and looking back on this hobby, a lot has changed since I first got involved:
- Discord servers chats are a huge real-time resource these days
- Reddit blew up as alternative to the traditional forum type of website
- Production quality of YouTube video reviews have become much better
- Audio measurements have become much more transparent and readily available
- More companies and more products are on the market
- Audio gear has become more readily available to obtain
It's crazy to see how the industry has changed over the years. Back in 2012 when I was first starting to attend the small local Head-Fi meets in library conference rooms, I never thought I would attend the convention-like events such as CanJam because such events weren't around in Seattle at the time, and it's really cool to see them happening here now.
The Pacific Audio Fest has been around for a few years now. I was at AXPONA last year when I first heard about it from a flyer that was at one of the exhibitor's rooms. This year, I was visiting Seattle for Father's Day, and my time there happened to be in-line with one of the days of the event. I was lucky to be a part of Audeze's e-mailing list because otherwise I would have never known the event was during my stay in Seattle. I only brought my 85mm lens with me on this trip, so most of the photos here are not whole-room photos.
Normally I register for these events in advanced, but since this was a last-minute add-on to my trip, I was too late for the online one-day pass sale.
The hotel area itself is quite charming: the surrounding area has a lot of Evergreen trees, the hotel has a lot of wood crossbeams along the ceiling, and the myriad of branched hallways have a very open architecture with lots of windows to allow natural light to come through. I've never been in a hotel quite like this one before. Upon checking in at the registration table, I had to spend a few minutes looking at the map to understand the layout of the event. The map wasn't quite as linear as say RMAF, AXPONA, or CanJam events, so I kind of just walked around the venue without going anywhere in particular.
I will say, the Marketplace area of these 2-channel events are really cool to browse through just because they usually have a variety of music-related things to purchase, not just audio equipment. This is a music-oriented industry after all, so I've made a few purchases from these areas in the past including vinyl records, high-quality 2L BluRay audio discs, specialty format CDs including SACDs, etc. I hope Head-Fi can have a similar type of area in the future as the events grow.
Although 2-channel impressions here aren't relevant for the personal audio space, my favorite rooms were Next Level HiFi's room featuring the Borrensen M6 speakers, the VonSchweikert Audio room (who was playing London Grammar's "Wasting my Young Years" song and almost made me cry), and the Popori Acoustics room with really cool-looking, woofer-free, non-curved electrostatic speakers.
I will say, Acoustic Sciences' TubeTraps were in pretty much all of the listening rooms. Being that this is mostly a 2-channel convention, room acoustics and controlling the environment are critical. I'm glad that the TubeTraps were being used because more often than not, a lot of the rooms actually sounded pretty good. I've been to a handful of 2-channel events where the room treatment wasn't optimal, or non-existent, and the system just sounds awful.
I will say, Acoustic Sciences' TubeTraps were in pretty much all of the listening rooms. Being that this is mostly a 2-channel convention, room acoustics and controlling the environment are critical. I'm glad that the TubeTraps were being used because more often than not, a lot of the rooms actually sounded pretty good. I've been to a handful of 2-channel events where the room treatment wasn't optimal, or non-existent, and the system just sounds awful.
This part is more relevant to Head-Fi, but I since I was on a time crunch with only a 6-hour day for the whole event, I didn't do much critical listening.
As a side note, if you're reading this, do you use Qobuz, or another streaming service, or both? I attended David Solomon's seminar about Qobuz and it seemed like an infomercial with some interesting history of the industry. I asked a kind of technical question about two conflicting things he said and he couldn't provide an answer. I'm kind of intrigued about Qobuz, but I don't do as much critical listening as I used to do these days, so I'm not sure how it sounds compared to other streaming services.
STAX had a couple tables at this event, which was surprising to me. A familiar face, Douglas, was manning the booth, and I saw Mike Liang of Woo Audio actually enjoying the convention instead of running a table this time.
It was really cool to see an attendee come up to the booth and pull out his SR-007 MKI. I fell in love with that headphone on one of my first Head-Fi mini-meets.
Coming from the Lambda series myself, I always thought the L700 earspeakers sounded good (although I still think the L500 is a better value), and the L700 MK2 were no exception straight out of the portable SRM-D10 amplifier. They were missing some kick on the low-end, but they drove them pretty well overall! I didn't hear the "Lambda" 2 kHz shoutiness peak that's in the older Lambdas.
I never had the chance to compare the SR-009S to the SR-X9000 side-by-side before, so I got to try that here. There's a huge improvement in sound between the two when being driven on the SRM-T8000. The soundstage from the 009 to the X9000 just opens up significantly, the instrument separation becomes much larger, and the brightness I disliked in the 009/009S headphones isn't there on the X9000. It's really, a great headphone.
As the saying goes: "welcome to Head-Fi, sorry about your wallet."
It was really cool to see an attendee come up to the booth and pull out his SR-007 MKI. I fell in love with that headphone on one of my first Head-Fi mini-meets.
Coming from the Lambda series myself, I always thought the L700 earspeakers sounded good (although I still think the L500 is a better value), and the L700 MK2 were no exception straight out of the portable SRM-D10 amplifier. They were missing some kick on the low-end, but they drove them pretty well overall! I didn't hear the "Lambda" 2 kHz shoutiness peak that's in the older Lambdas.
I never had the chance to compare the SR-009S to the SR-X9000 side-by-side before, so I got to try that here. There's a huge improvement in sound between the two when being driven on the SRM-T8000. The soundstage from the 009 to the X9000 just opens up significantly, the instrument separation becomes much larger, and the brightness I disliked in the 009/009S headphones isn't there on the X9000. It's really, a great headphone.
As the saying goes: "welcome to Head-Fi, sorry about your wallet."
To be honest, I'm not a big fan of Campfire Audio's products minus the Andromeda, but friends told me to try out the Solaris Stellar Horizon.
Normally, in-ears are either too bright, or too bassy to my ears. The Solaris Stellar Horizon was on the warm side, but bearable. The treble seemed a bit rolled off compared to what I'm used to with the UE RR, and grainier-sounding, but instrument separation was quite good. Considering it's nearly 2.5x as expensive as the UE RR that I really like, it's not even a consideration to me.
Next to it, the Trifecta is an absolute beauty externally. It has a very unique and industrial kind of styling to it that's different from the other products in Campfire's lineup. Sound-wise, it is not my cup of tea at all; it sounded very bass-bloated.
Normally, in-ears are either too bright, or too bassy to my ears. The Solaris Stellar Horizon was on the warm side, but bearable. The treble seemed a bit rolled off compared to what I'm used to with the UE RR, and grainier-sounding, but instrument separation was quite good. Considering it's nearly 2.5x as expensive as the UE RR that I really like, it's not even a consideration to me.
Next to it, the Trifecta is an absolute beauty externally. It has a very unique and industrial kind of styling to it that's different from the other products in Campfire's lineup. Sound-wise, it is not my cup of tea at all; it sounded very bass-bloated.
I haven't been browsing the audio forums recently, so I've missed out on some news. ETA Audio had a table at the event and they offer some unique products. Their dynamic drivers are made in-house, and the earcups are 3D printed for better tuning properties; pretty neat considering Dan Clark Audio is using the AMTS technology to tune his headphones now.
I listened to their lineup of current, and prototypes of future, products. They all sounded pretty solid overall, fairly balanced and neutral-sounding.
The O2 open-back headphone had a bit too much treble energy for me and sounded a bit too sharp.
I actually preferred the closed-back Mini C headphone more since it didn't have this sharpness. I really liked the sound from the Mini C actually and would recommend giving it a listen if you can.
I listened to their lineup of current, and prototypes of future, products. They all sounded pretty solid overall, fairly balanced and neutral-sounding.
The O2 open-back headphone had a bit too much treble energy for me and sounded a bit too sharp.
I actually preferred the closed-back Mini C headphone more since it didn't have this sharpness. I really liked the sound from the Mini C actually and would recommend giving it a listen if you can.
As a side note, if you're reading this, do you use Qobuz, or another streaming service, or both? I attended David Solomon's seminar about Qobuz and it seemed like an infomercial with some interesting history of the industry. I asked a kind of technical question about two conflicting things he said and he couldn't provide an answer. I'm kind of intrigued about Qobuz, but I don't do as much critical listening as I used to do these days, so I'm not sure how it sounds compared to other streaming services.
The rest of these posts will be more of a visual browse-through of some of the photos I took at the event. Overall though, I had a great time at this event. Although these types of conventions weren't around when I first got into the hobby, it's great to see them happening more often in more places these days. Even if it's not a personal audio convention like the CanJam events, or mini Head-Fi meets, I'd recommend attending one just to experience it. It's not your typical convention, and if you're reading this on Head-Fi, you're already interested in high-end audio systems.
