Hello all,
I just wanted to see how many people were planning on attending Pacific Audio Fest 2023 later this month.
It’s scheduled for Friday, June 23 through Sunday, June 25, 2023 at the Doubletree Hilton Sea-Tac at tickets are $20 for one day, $35 for multi-day. The exhibitors/brands list looks decent.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Vic
I am flying up for this from LA. My cousin lives near Sea/Tac. We will go together. Should be a nice weekend. I kind of left the vendor list for a surprise, I usually enjoy myself better that way. Are you attending?
I will be heading down from Vancouver. Looking forward to it, last year was great. I expect it to be busier this year so maybe not as much demo time but still lots of good exhibitors. Enjoy the chance to listen to some new head-fi as well as speaker gear.
Heading to SoCal Canjam later in the year for the full head-fi experience.
I plan to attend and it’ll be my first significant event so I looked at the vendors list. I’m not sure which day(s) I’ll be there, so I’ll probably buy a multi-day pass.
Regards,
Vic
I attended Capital Audiofest 2022 near DC last November. There is a lot of vendor/exhibitor overlap with PAF, and many of the same headphone vendors too.
I found that CAF made the broad differences between setups obvious, as each speaker vendor had a private room and the headphones were clustered in quiet areas. However, some rooms are an acoustic challenge so be a little forgiving. But don’t forgive the terrible setups with screechy treble or that are playing too loud, or that use incompatible chains. Some vendors surely don’t hear the same as you…
Have fun.
I had a busy day at CAF on Friday, and then went back for a narrower follow up on Sunday. To my ears the setups clustered into a few broad categories, such as 1) ultra smooth, powerful, and refined, 2) excessive treble and/or volume, 3) excessive tube distortion/weird timing issues, 4) transparent open-baffle setups, and 5) misguided marketing (you’ll know it when you see it).
I know I’m new here, but I’ll be at PAF
ill likely try to attend Friday. I know @LETSHUOER is planning on coming down for this as well. Hopefully others come too. Maybe we can do a mini gathering for beers at the hotel bar?
That would be fun and maybe a smaller lift for folks compared to our stand-alone meetups as they don’t have to bring any gear.
Thinking about going on Saturday as soon as it opens and will probably leave by 2p.
I’m going to try to go tomorrow afternoon. hopefully work doesnt get in the way.
Sounds good. I’m trying to get there before noon and take some photos of the various setups.
I went yesterday, and while I generally had a good time, I swear that some of the vendors were playing at a volume where if you didn’t have hearing loss when you went it, you would have it when you left their room. In one room, the system sounded generally good with deeper male vocals, but k.d. Lang’s rendition of Halleluja made the system sound off. Another set up brought the brass instruments forward, but everything else sounded recessed and in a two-dimension, vague plane behind the brass.
I’m going back today, but mainly to try out the LTA MZ3.
I checked the volume of several CAF rooms with my Apple Watch dB meter. The worst was Black Ice Audio (formerly Jolinda) at 90 dB. Many rooms were 70-80 dB (fine), while some with big floor standers pushed beyond 80 dB to prove their power.
I was frustrated by LTA’s test setups. They paired their cheapest amps with cheaper DACs and headphones, and their expensive amps with expensive chains. This made it impossible to compare relative amp performance. See ‘misguided marketing’ above…
They only have their MZ3 and Z10E here at the show, using iBasso DX320 DAPs as their sources. I tried out various headphones on the two amps, including my HE1000SE. I also demo’d the DX320 with the headphones and may contemplate getting one.
Really glad I got to go today as I haven’t attended any of the big(ger) audio shows before. Pretty impressed by Gershman Acoustics, Dutch & Dutch, Odyssey Audio.
Not much headphone stuff, plus it was impossible to really hear much given all the acoustics and noise.
The LTA prototype DAC sounded pretty good.
Pretty cool to get to chat with David Solomon of Qobuz.
Wish I could have seen Pink Faun.
I went on Friday afternoon with @LETSHUOER and @xiaoyaoyou . I will say that it was a lot better than last year. For whatever reason, this year, I think the vendors did a better job with room treatments despite being in the same setups as last year. The speakers didnt sound horrible like they did last year. They were loud as Vic mentioned, but not as loud as they were last year!
I didn’t try any headphones unfortunately, but there was a specific room just for headphones and “quiet” accessories, and not in the same room as guitars lol. Also seems like a few more vendors in the headphone area this year than last, including ETA and Campfire. Overall, it seemed like there was more “affordable” stuff this year too. And I say affordable with massive air quotes, as they are still pretty pricey speakers for the average joe.
That said, there was some really cool equipment all around. I really liked that I got to see all the different network streamers I have been eyeing all in the same place, so that was cool. They look a lot better in real life than in internet photos, which is always a plus too!
Oh one interesting thing that was on display in a few rooms was a prototype DAC from LTA that was R-2R + Tubes. It didn’t have a chassis yet, so it was just a bunch of PCBs and tubes cobbled together, but looks promising!
Agree. It sounded pretty good.
They said:
I don’t want to start a back and forth but I don’t think the comment on LTA’s setups is fair and want to clarify for others.
At their headphone area LTA had: X9K, Corina, CRBN, Caldera, Utopia (New), Meze Elite, Meze 109, LCD-5, LCD-X, Verite Closed.
In terms of headphone amps, they had 2x z10e (highest tier amp) and one MZ3. Their DACs were a DX320 and DX320 Max Ti for each amp. Not the best but really DAC nuance is hard to pick up on a show floor.
In two of their speaker rooms they had their prototype DAC (which sounded excellent) and even had their prototype 100W mono blocks, that they let us demo a Susvara on (which was unbelievable).
