[mithrandir38]

Saturday 9-4 at CanJam and nothing but Disney since, I'm beat! I went with a mission and made a friend so super happy with the experience! Everyone was great really.
The mission was to learn about DAP's and IEM's and get myself a portable setup. The AK is obviously a great player in all its forms but in the end I went with a Questyle QP1R. Some limits to its features but it does what I want it to do and it sounds great and looks and feels good to me, "The Source Audio Group" had them at the show, nice guys too, they spent a lot of time advising me on how to get the most from my new player. Seriously, this is my first experience with digital audio besides a low res iPod!
For Universal IEM's I spent forever going back and forth. Noble, Cardas, UE, Audio 64, one other? So I was pretty much on the Noble Savant train outa there when I start going back and forth with my new audio pal mithrandir38
. He wanted to make sure the Audio 64 U6 I was listening to got a fair shake and even loaned me his AK player so I could audition them with some great tunes (Rush anyone?). I was stoked as he had spent quite a while in the morning explaining some stuff about portable audio to me. As amazing as the Noble Savants sounded they were just a bit shy in the bass and I was not able to get a comfortable fit. I was afraid they might be fatiguing both in the sound and fit departments, even though I was very taken with them. At the end of my day I was sitting on a couch debating with myself and I looked up to see mithrandir38
 with his credit card out at the Audio 64 booth, LOL, that pushed me over the edge, so I got a pair too. These are some seriously sweet sounding IEM's. Big, beautiful, detailed, with a full measure of bass, and they fit perfect. I know they will be comfortable and non fatiguing. I'll figure out some way to pay for them... Chuck Reynolds was super nice to me too, great outfit, great show deal.
Bonus, thanks to Cardas! Their A8 was really nice sounding. For the price, if you are not playing the "audiophile" card, they rock! I preferred them to the EM5813. Well I found out I won a pair! CanJam was the place to be, right? Only slight glitch is I had already told my wife I got a DAP and IEM combo, so when I told her later that I had just won a pair of 300$ Cardas A8's she just smiled and said great, her old cheapie earbuds were falling apart and she would be happy to have them, DOH!
Thanks to Cavalli for helping me to A/B demo the Spark with an AK player to see what the little amp could do. It is not a subtle difference! There may be a Cavalli portable amp in my future. Also for letting me play with the Tungsten amp. This was not on my  mission but I wanted to hear a high end headphone based system while I was there. I felt like "mister microphone". Hopefully you get my drift. And yes the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. Startling really.

Glad I could be of service! It was cool, man! Make sure to email Chuck to process your order since the site isn't set up to process an order from the show.

 

[gr8soundz]

Did anyone hear any headphones at the show by Mitchell & Johnson?
 
They're a new company making some hybrid electrostatic/dynamic headphones. Tyll featured them a couple months ago and they were listed as a SoCal vendor.
 

 

[Neccros]

Not really an "Impression" post but I started to notice a lot of the DAP's running Android as their OS looked very similar especially when using the volume control and it will show you as a number what its set to.  
 
Anyone know if this is a basic audio player app that can be ran on a regular android phone? or is this some app that's customized among the manufactures?? 
 
Also was the Pioneer DAP designed with A&K or is it a coincidence that it had a similar shape?
 
Will the scavenger hunt results be posted here?
 
 
Thanks for another great Canjam!!  I finally got over being intimidated from listening to the high end gear I know nothing about nor can afford!!  Also learned a few things I didn't know about which helped me understand this hobby. AND got to geek out with Patrick Norton from Tekthing and Tested fame!!
 
Can't wait for next year!

 

[willsw]

I got to them as they were packing up Saturday and very quickly listened through my not high-quality phone, and then forgot to stop by Sunday (not too much time to wander while manning your own booth), so all I can report is that the bass is satisfying in amount and that I'm looking forward to my Kickstarter set to arrive next month, when I'm sure the forum will be full of reviews.

 

[bmichels]

  Anyone remembers which Accuphase SACD player was in the Stax demo room?  The sound was sublime feeding to the 007 and 009.  Thanks.  

 
I also would like to know.  Indeed I am looking for a SACD and I have a STAX-R009 on order

 

[willsw]

On the plane back to DC from the SoCal CanJam now and just wanted to thank everyone who stopped by our booth for trying out the amp and listening to our spiel. Thanks for giving us your listening time! There was so much incredible gear (so much!) there that spending several minutes getting to know the ZOTL sound meant a lot. And to that guy who had the cap question, apologies for the misunderstanding; senses of humor sometimes clash.

Also thanks again to ZMF, HiFiMAN, and MrSpeakers for letting us use their headphones to demo our units. We received a lot of feedback that people were happy to have heard your headphones on our amp.

Personally, this was my first experience with Stax, and I now understand. From the 009s on the Blue Hawaii to the vintage Lambdas someone hooked up to our MicroZOTL2 via the speaker outs, those headphones sound incredible. And that Liquid Tungsten! I believe all I could say after hearing that was, "yeah . . . yeah!"

 

[swnger]

I wanted to thank everyone for all the great postings from the show.  I wasn't able to attend but as I sat in my office this weekend reading the post was almost like being there.
I did this weekend post a review of the Meze classic 99. I'm in agreement with the people that listened to them at the show.
My review here:
 
http://www.head-fi.org/users/447014/reviews
 
Thanks again to everyone for the great reports.

 

[jminchoi]

Very interesting show! It was the first time I've ever been to a meet. I was on the fence about going, but I am glad to have gone. The show was very well organized and I was able to sample so many headphones in a short amount of time. I'm not as technical as some of you, but enjoyed listening to all different types of headphones and will list what I enjoyed. The highlights for me:
 
Stax, I loved their sound signature. It was the first time I've ever seen their stuff and heard electrostatic headphones.Blown away. Great clarity and lovely sound. I'd love to pick up their stuff next.
 
Mr Speakers Ether - I loved their sound signature as well. It was hooked up through a Cavalli amp.
 
Audeze - First time I've heard their stuff, I enjoyed the LCD-4's and the LCD-XCs connected to the WA7tp at the Woo Audio room.
 
Westone - I've never tried IEMs, I was pretty tired and tried the W40s and W60s at the end of the day. Really nice sound connected straight to my iphone.
 
McIntosh - There was a McIntosh setup in one of the rooms that I thought sounded excellent.
 
To be honest, most everything sounded pretty good. It was hard to say that there was a headphone that I didn't like as most setups at the show were so well calibrated. The ones listed above went above and beyond for me, just don't have the stomach to spend $10k. I'm glad I left the credit card at home and took a day to process.
 
A big thanks to all that helped setup the show!!

 

[catroni]

Anyone got a photo of the Kannon's? 

 

[calaf]

  Anyone got a photo of the Kannon's? 

google is your friend http://tactiontechnology.com/?page_id=270

 

[bearFNF]

Bear, how long until CanJam 2017 check in? 

I'm not done with this year's show yet Still one day till I can check-in to go home.

Will let you know next week.

 

[austinpop]

I want to dispel a possible misunderstanding - there weren't quiet "rooms" for the Tungsten auditions, there is ONE beta prototype, which was housed in Warren Chi's hotel room. It was on a fully exposed open PCB board, with no housing for protection. This means it is not only incredibly easy to break, but there are also exposed capacitors with dangerous voltages. So they had to keep the environment controlled. Does that make sense?

 
Exactly, brother.
 
When I got to the Tungsten room, they were running about 20 minutes behind schedule. The guy "minding" the rig clearly had some kind of verbal diarrhea, because he talked nonstop. I'm not even sure to whom he was talking. Luckily he left before it was my turn, and I actually had a quiet room. What bliss!! Maybe that's why I liked it so much.
 
Which brings me to one aspect of CanJam that I didn't like - the noise. I realize that conversational noise is unavoidable at the listening tables, but I think a lot could be done if exhibitors, organizers, et al. actually made an effort to allow people to listen. It's one thing if you're manning the station and answering questions and talking about the equipment. But there were a lot of socializing and casual conversations happening right next to people trying to listen. It would be good to take that outside into the hallways.
 
Maybe it's cultural, maybe it's just me, but I'm not going to apologize for at least hoping for some improvement in this area. 

 

[Mediahound]

Originally Posted by rajivarora /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
Which brings me to one aspect of CanJam that I didn't like - the noise. I realize that conversational noise is unavoidable at the listening tables, but I think a lot could be done if exhibitors, organizers, et al. actually made an effort to allow people to listen. It's one thing if you're manning the station and answering questions and talking about the equipment. But there were a lot of socializing and casual conversations happening right next to people trying to listen. It would be good to take that outside into the hallways.

+1
 
I wasn't there but totally agree any listening room should be like a library and as completely silent as possible. I mean how much of the audio quality can you really actually hear and discern with a high noise floor? The signal to noise ratio of the audio to your ears would be too bad to even be able to evaluate anything very well. 

 

[MadDane]

Great coverage guys, thanks for all of your impressions,

 

[Gilly87]

Such an awesome CanJam! Thanks to everyone who came by the Echobox booth