AXPONA 2011 Coverage

April 18, 2011

The Carnegie Acoustics, Mach2 Music and VAC Room

Another new entrant in the high-end arena is Carnegie Acoustics which is to be congratulated for addressing the problem of poor hotel room acoustics head on. They demoed their new CST2 speakers ($5995/pair). Their efforts were rewarded with good sound.

The digital front end was a Mach2 Music modded Apple Mac Mini ($1495). As best I can tell from their website, they remove the hard drive and place it in a separate USB enclosure for music storage, and install a solid state hard drive to run the operating system and music playback software. In addition, they configure the OS X operating system to turn off all unnecessary processes so that the CPU can be devoted to music replay. I’m not sure the vise-like MacSandwich ($199) is necessary. Having replaced the hard drive with an SSD, there are no moving parts in the Mac Mini, except when you are ripping your CDs to storage.