Some rooms just look like more fun than others. Sometimes it’s the crowd. Sometimes its the gear. And sometimes its the guy doing the demo. Every time I walked by the Audio Physic room at AXPONA, someone was grinning at me. That’s contagious!
Sound from the luscious white and black ~$25k Avantera Anniversary Model from Audio Physic was compelling, immediate, captivating and a few other audiophile clichés thrown in for good measure. In short, I thought it was great. It was totally worth a side of an LP or a couple of tracks off a CD. Color me a fan! And now, I’m very interested in catching more of the Audio Physic lineup.
Drawn in by attitude and captivated by sound. It was a great way to spend time.
Nothing in particular stood out, though, to underscore this opinion. Which, in itself, says something. Since none of this gear was familiar to me, it was impossible to sort out what was contributing to what. So, taken as a whole, I found the bass to be quite adequate, if not life threateningly deep. Treble was clean and pure, but I thought the focus was more on the mid range, which was just delightfully inviting. Just when I think I really favor pure linearity, and perhaps even a bit of lean if it means I get a smidgeon more detail, I wander into a room like this one and have all that carefully constructed preconceptions swept away. The truth is, I could live with this system. Happily. Is that bad to say?
The turntable was a $7,500 Acoustic Signature Storm and had a $2,00 Funk F-X R-II tonearm mounted on it. I forget what the cartridge was, but all the cabling was Nordost.
In a room of unfamiliar gear, Trigon is a brand that is entirely new to me (I’d at least heard of Audio Physic, for example, even if I hadn’t heard their speakers yet). Here, their $2,000 Trigon Advance phono stage was feeding an $5,000 Trigon Energy integrated. Aside from the speakers themselves, and the big spool of Nordost Valhalla speaker cables, the most expensive thing in the room was the $10k Trigon Chronolog CD/Music Server.
