Report from A&V Festa 2005, part 3
OK, moving along. This last part I will dedicate to some of the smaller, lesser known products which I found kind of exciting.
First off is the Mini 2004 Stereo Integrated Amplifier (2 x 12 W Ultralinear Class AB) from Hong Kong maker Audio Space which is one of the largest Chinese makers of high-end vacuum tube amplifiers. I listened a little to a demo of one of their amplifiers, but the room was crowded and I was far outside any sweetspot, so I couldn’t really judge the quality. The Mini’s were awfully cool looking though!
Next up is the Assam polyhedric speakers from Solid Acoustics. Check out the picture below! These were demoed in a very open space so I really couldn’t judge the quality of these either, however they looked radically different from any other speaker I’ve seen, so I’d love to take a closer listen to them at some point!
And finally one interesting product was the CA-S3 micro-size integrated amplifier from Flying Mole (great name!) which is really tiny at only 130 x 54 x 142 mm in size! The minimalistic design was really sweet (just one big volume knob and a power button in a sleek silver casing) and it will fit just about anywhere. When demoing this, the company had connected it to an iPod, so there is no way in judging the quality but the specs looked very good on paper… (Hooking up iPods to high-end amps seemed to be the latest fad, I even saw a company hook one up to a $1,000+ tube amp!) It wasn’t extremely expensive either, the SGRP was 70,000 Yen.
(sorry for the bad picture, I never took one myself)