CES 2009

Grade-A nice guy Graemme Brown of Zen Mastering is explaining the setup in the Soundlabs / Isomike room before newphew Nate starts the proceedings. Those of you not familiar with Kimber Kable's IsoMike™ technique of recording, suffice to say it produces some uncanny result if you like image specificity and "you are there" realism. With Pass amplifiers, the Sound Lab Prostat speakers stand 8' 8" tall and project along a slight horizontal arc. It's really just two of their Majestic 945 speakers standing side by side in order to get enough horizontal coverage of the large room in which they were positioned. There were also a pair (or is that a quad, hehe) in the rear, but these weren't on for the demo when I was there.

While a outdoor drum corp recording they made with benefit of "Isomike" and a 60 foot boom was interesting, it was a Fry Street Quartet recording of Beethoven's opus 18 #4 that really sold me on the my continued adoration for all-things-electrostatic. Driven by Ed Meitner designed emmLabs electronics, the sound was impressively realistic. While some will criticize electrostatics as rolled off in the high end, they do sound more like what I hear in a well-coiffed concert hall than nearly all dynamic speakers, so hats off to Sound Lab for fighting the good fight.