Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2016

As I mentioned in my previous post, I will be attending Rocky Mountain Audio Fest this year in October. This will be my first time attending it, and I'm pretty dang excited to go. I hope to see lots of good equipment shown off there and maybe even meet some of my favorite people in the hi-fi community.

Some of the equipment I will want to check out will include turntables, preamplifiers, power amplifiers, integrated amplifiers, speakers, and possibly CD/SACD players. Hopefully I will come across a lot of things with innovative technology. VPI Industries is definitely a company I have high regards for, and they pretty much reinvented a lot of aspects of turntables. VPI turntables typically have uni-pivot tonearms that are made of extremely rigid material to pretty much eliminate resonance so there is no added color to the sound. You may as well not even call it a tonearm because there's pretty much no tone! It's more or less passive and it is absolutely amazing!

With that said, the show should be a fun experience overall. I will discover a lot of good companies and equipment I have never even heard of before, and I will be exposed to new things that I am sure to find incredible. Maybe I could even take advantage of the discounted show prices.

Technics SL-1200G & SL-1200GAE Turntable

Back in January, Technics announced that they were going to be releasing a new model of the Technics SL-1200 later this year, starting the famous SL-1200 line back up again after it had been discontinued in 2010. There will be both a 50th anniversary limited edition model, the SL-1200GAE, which will go for a limited run of 1200 models (funny number, isn't it?), and the standard version, the SL-1200G. It will have a series of new designs including a new tonearm, new motor, new platter, among others. It was shown at CES 2016 and will be available this summer.

Being a belt drive fan, it's hard for me to imagine ever wanting a direct-driven turntable such as the SL-1200, but heck, this thing, especially the 50th anniversary model, is a piece of turntable history! Technics even invented the direct drive turntable back in the 1970s! Although belt drive is generally considered to be for hi-fi use whereas direct drive is the kind of thing you would see your local disc jockey using, Technics SL-1200s have gotten the attention of both DJs and audiophiles alike for their sheer durability, low noise, and overall performance. Even though I typically prefer belt-driven turntables, I would definitely get either the SL-1200G or SL-200GAE just for those reasons alone. I will also be attending Rocky Mountain Audio Fest later this year and will likely get to see it shown off. I would even save up $4,000 for it if I had to. This thing truly is a beautiful piece of equipment.