Well, here I am, bumping dead threads.
The speakers were fairly nice. At lower to medium volumes they were near-perfect from midrange up. However, the bass was uneven and seemed to disappear at around 40hz. During the `Elmo` test the sound became congested and the soundstage literally collapsed. I'm kinda interested in hearing the F30's now though, which, at least from their specs, should extend about as low as the Omegas.
Putting my Cary in place of Wilson's Meridian improved (at least subjectively) the bottom end extension and brought back the texture that 507 stripped from the sound. But even it couldn't do much about room resonances and -5db @ 40hz roll off of the Revels.
(uh yeah, I care about bass a lot)
The only other setups I listened to at the meet were the two PPAs and Ray Samuel's HR-2.
HR-2 (OPA627'ed) with HP-1/2 performed at about the level of Headroom Total Airhead which I guess is not too shabby after all. High-end extension was eh, but I personally can somewhat tolerate that. The show-stopper for me was in the mids. They felt veiled, and midrange detail extraction was horrid to a degree that could not be explained by the masking effect of the outside noise. Bass was rather anemic, but that could be attributed to the Meridian that HR-2 was hooked up to.
PPA was okay, and I certainly did like it better than the HR-2. Too bad I forgot to hook it up to my Cary. Anyway, midrange detail was again sub-par compared to what I'm used to, but overall sound was more enjoyable and coherent. Bass-boost switch was kinda fun to play with, but it stripped the bass of all the texture and added too much bloom to be useful. I spent some time just listening to momo with that amp, and it was nice.
Too bad my amp decided to die right when Tim from Experience Audio was going to listen to it. Oh well. The total damage is about $15 since I've got all the components here already + a few hours of very annoying resoldering work, but I'm actually not going to do that. I've been toying with some ideas for a while now and this looks like the perfect time to try them out, so the amp board is going to be totally rebuilt. I'm going to leave the power supplies as is for now though 'cause changing anything there would call for much more money than I am willing to spend on audio at the moment.
It was funny hearing people at the meet complain about not having enough gain on the [deceased] amp. I set it up so that the volume where I do most of my listening is in the 2db-step range of DACT to make the volume control at least partially useful. As far as I'm concerned, the amp still goes to earsplitting levels, it's just that you kids all listen way too loud. It is true though that some of the most impressive virtues of the electrostats can only be heard in complete silence (which we had none of).