RMAF 2019 Show Report Part 1: The Music Room, Boulder Amplifiers, REL, Vienna Acoustics, Clearaudio, AMG

Like a hacky sacker focusing on lift, each year after Rocky Mountain Audio Festival in Denver (RMAF) I try to keep my stoke level high after the event. Blog-based tours of the show start popping up right away, but it's not long before I run out of material to read. So this year I thought we'd add to the post-show chorus, and take you on a little visual tour of what ended up being a fantastic RMAF for The Music Room.

TMR, as we call ourselves, has often been in attendance at shows like this, but until this year we never had a proper exhibit room. For the 2019 festival we were chosen as the Al Steiffel Memorial Room recipients, which is an exhibition suite in the hotel awarded by the Colorado Audio Society each year to smaller companies that are making waves in the industry.

We brought two very eclectic and colorful systems to the show, using fantastic gear from all over hifi audio's past and present. I teamed up with our photographer Larson Baird, to run around the show, and we might as well start our tour at room 7102, home for the weekend to yours truly, The Music Room.

In our main listening room, we set up a pair of Harbeth 40.2 speakers, powered by a pair of vintage McIntosh MC60 mono tube amplifiers, preamplified by a Line Magnetic 25-B vintage tube pre (a total unicorn), and fed by either the Rega RP8 turntable to a Luxman EQ-500 phono preamplifier or an Ayre QX-5 Twenty DAC with DLNA input. Rounding out the system was Kimber Select KS 6055 speaker cables, Audioquest Tornado power cables, an >Audioquest Niagara power conditioner and two REL T-9i subwoofers.

A popular question in this room was whether we "needed" the subwoofers. We had to chuckle, as we could have been asked if we needed a set of Harbeth 40.2 speakers in a hotel room. None of us needs top of the line hifi gear like silver speaker cables, but for goodness sake - we want them! An excellent pair of subwoofers can improve any pair of speakers, no matter how "full-range," and these, though a touch undersized, really cemented what for many attendees was admittedly one of the better-sounding rooms in the whole show.

Not that competition wasn't tough in some quarters, or even just down the hall. One of the most impressive and expensive rooms in the show was the Soundings dealership room, which was an expansive suite highlighting a jaw-dropping mega-system.

The divine Vienna Acoustics Liszt Speakers caught my eye first, followed by the 6- yes, 6 REL S/812 subwoofers standing guard on the sides. The S/812 was released to the world by REL literally days before the show, and boasts -1dB at 10Hz. 

Powering the massive sound in there was a Boulder Amplifiers 1160 amp, 1110 preamplifier, 2120 DAC - serious works of art, all.

Many in the show weren't afraid to toss on some vinyl, and the Soundings room was no exception. On the main system they had a Clearaudio turntable spinning, and walking into the next room revealed static displays of a gorgeous AMG turntable and a Clearaudio Concept Wood TT. 

Of course, on the way out out it was hard not to notice the giant slab of swiss cheesed aluminum heatsink dominating the table it was placed on.