The 2023 Pacific Audio Fest is a wrap! It was a fun time for catching up with friends and colleagues, and of course you, dear readers.

It was nice to see Doc Robinson at PAF 2023. I really had a nice time catching up with Positive Feedback Managing Editors Dave & Carol Clark during PAF. Super cool peeps! 

No photos of Dave & Carol, as I had a photographic mishap where I lost quite a number of photos that I snapped at PAF. Apologies to all. Bummer. 

I really enjoy it when readers stop and talk with me. James told me how happy he was with the Duelund tinned-copper cables in his audio system.  As a fellow Duelund cable enthusiast, I know exactly what James means. Enjoy those cables, James! 

Then of course there's all the audio kit on display playing music, an abundance of vinyl records for sale, and all those tempting accessories. There was other stuff too, memorabilia, t-shirts, and such. Oh, and last but definitely not least, there were two awesome concerts to attend in the evenings. 

My adventure started with my flight into Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday. Turns out Friday was the busiest day ever for SEA, with 196,000 passengers passing through the facility. 

It was a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd in most of the airport, and on my return trip there were long lines at TSA, but I managed to get through pretty quickly with my TSA PreCheck (well worth it). Busy place, but efficiently organized.

I rode the DoubleTree # 1 bus into the facility, and found it to be another busy place.

Quite a few of the Seattle cruise ships use the DoubleTree as the entry / exit point for incoming / departing passengers, airlines flight crews also stay there, and then all of the people attending the Pacific Audio Fest were there. It was busy.

I had a nice view from my room of Mt. Rainier, whose summit is a scant 60 miles from Seattle.

For those who don't know, Mt. Rainier is a large active volcano, and Seattle is pretty close. For comparisons sake, Pompeii was 5 miles from Mt. Vesuvius, and we know how that turned out after the eruption of 79 CE.

I'm just kidding of course. Mostly. 

I picked up my badge from Marjorie, picked up the 2023 Pacific Audio Fest t-shirt I had purchased in advance, and grabbed a show guide to help me find my way around.

Thank you Marjorie, Lou, and Gary, you did a great job putting on the 2023 Pacific Audio Fest!

I decided to start on the first hall and then work my way back. 

I like to go to the Audio Note (UK) room first to start a show. I'm familiar with the performance of the kit, and I know it's going to sound good, and play music well with both analog and digital sources, so it serves as a great calibration reference. 

Kudos to Adrian, who did an outstanding job of getting the room setup, dialed in, and sounding great.

Think about how hard it is to get a new system dialed in at home, and how long it takes.

Adrian had a day to get everything unboxed, and then setup. It took 13 hours strait of unpacking, setup, and dialing in the performance. 

The Fest system was:

• TT Three Turntable with PSU3 / ARM THREE/II / IO I Moving Coil cartridge / AN-S4L Step Up Transformer
• CDT TWO/II Red Book CD Transport, DAC2.1X Signature
• Meishu Phono Tonmeister Silver 300B SET integrated amplifier
• AN-E/LX Hemp Speakers with dedicated stands.

One nice thing about the Audio Note (UK) kit is that it is designed to perform at its best with the loudspeakers in room boundary positions (corners), which makes more of the room space available to you, and the room boundary design of AN-E/LX Hemp loudspeakers mostly takes the room out of the equation for being a barrier to good sound quality. 

That's handy, as the hotel rooms used for show demonstrations are notoriously tricky to get sounding good. 

Not only does that help getting a Fest system dialed in quickly performance-wise, but the same holds true when you set up an Audio Note (UK) system in your own home. 

I was delighted to see Jeff's Place listed on the posters in the halls of PAF 2023 - thanks Lou! 

Speaking of Lou (above), he had a pair of his gorgeous Daedalus Audio loudspeakers playing music in the Linear Tube Audio / Daedalus Audio / Small Green Computer / WyWires room.

Besides sounding great, Lou's Daedalus Audio loudspeakers have the most beautifully constructed cabinetry of any loudspeakers I have ever seen.

The Daedalus Audio loudspeaker cabinets are works of audio and woodworking art! 

I stopped in at the super cool Cardas Flashback Lounge.

Here's what Cardas said about The Cardas Flashback Lounge:

"The Cardas Flashback Lounge started this way."

"Wouldn't it be funny if we did our own room at an audio show, and decorated it like a teenager's bedroom? With a decent, but not esoteric, stereo. And played rock music the whole time. And made it more of a hangout place than a critical listening environment. To remind people of the time when they first fell in love with music. AND we'll have a 13 year old kid - our kid - running the system. Because you know, he's at that stage in his life!"

"I've rarely seen Josh so excited about something."

"We invite you to spend some time in the Cardas Flashback Lounge, room 2219, at Pacific Audio Fest, June 23-25. We'll be featuring decor and music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. And if you're old enough to remember those decades, then we'll offer you a beverage you couldn't have legally enjoyed when your mom was yelling at you to TURN DOWN THAT MUSIC!"

"There are plenty of rooms at every audio show that take the business of making great sound seriously - many of which use Cardas cables. In the Cardas Flashback Lounge, we'll be taking the business of fun and nostalgia seriously. See you there!"

There was quite a buzz at the Fest about how good the Audio Group Denmark's room was sounding.

I wasn't familiar with the Audio Group Denmark's line of products, but they clearly know how to build impressive sounding hi-fi kit.

Note that the Audio Group Denmark demo system utilized a digital source. Digital sources have come of age, and some of the best sounding, most musical, audio systems at the Fest were digital. 

Not everyone utilized digital sources, however.

The Triangle Art room had an impressive display with their turntables, vacuum tube amplification, and loudspeakers with wood horns for the midrange drivers. 

Ok, that's it for now. I'll have more to tell you about PAF 2023 in Part 2!