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Sunday afternoon Susan joined me at the Show, and she bought speakers!
She was in the market for an upgrade from the small bookshelf speakers she currently had.
The premier hi-fi store in New York City, Sound by Singer, ran a series of 5 rooms containing a sequence of increasingly expensive systems.
In the first room they were running a pair of low end JM Focal Chorus 836V speakers that sounded wonderful.
JM Focal is a French company that designs and manufactures some of the best speakers in the world, with the best weighing hundreds of pounds and
costing around $100,000. One of their specialties is the treble produced by their custom tweeters (high frequency drivers).
One reason Susan was impressed by the speakers is that she is very sensitive to those high frequencies that give acoustic performances,
especially strings, their lifelike sound, and Susan’s musical training and concert-going means she knows what instruments should sound like.
The speakers we heard at this particular demo sounded MUCH better than anything else in their price range at the Show, including the
new $2500 bookshelf speaker by Usher which we listened to for quite a while. After comparing speakers in various rooms, Susan decided to try to
buy the Focals. We had to talk to Andrew Singer personally, which for me was quite impressive because I have seen so many of his demos at Shows
and his ads in magazines. Unfortunately, the actual pair being played at the Show had already been sold. However, he had permission to sell
others at the same Show discount price, as long as the purchaser could wait for them to be shipped.
So for $2250 plus $150 delivery and setup cost, in a couple of weeks Susan will have a wonderful-sounding pair of speakers that retail for $3000.
Update: Susan has since received the speakers, and likes them very much. See picture on the left (they are about 4 feet tall):
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