SFAS held it’s first System Sunday event June 9, 2019. Our host, Fred von Lohmann, provides his impressions below. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re interested in hosting a System Sunday at your home (query@sfaudiophilesociety.com).
That’s a successful, inaugural System Sunday in the bag! I had a great time hosting and would recommend hosting future System Sundays to other SFAS members (especially here in SF!).
In order to accommodate folks in my smaller listening room (my living room), I decided to break it up into four hour-long sessions, with three participants at each. The basic idea was that each participant would get 15 minutes in the sweet spot to listen to their own selections (via Roon + TIDAL), followed by 15 minutes of group discussion. We mostly stuck to that, but made some adjustments for sessions where there were fewer than three participants or someone was late. And SFAS’s Alón Sagee joined us for the last one, so that was also great.
Despite the unusually warm temperatures in SF, I thought it went well. A total of ten SFAS members gave my system a workout, using a wide range of musical genres. We had selections from Wagner’s Ring, Beethoven’s Ninth, Joni Mitchell, the Miles Davis Quintet, Trentemøller, Pentatonix, The Band, Jacqui Naylor, and Keb Mo, to name just a few. About half the attendees were from SF, with the remainder from Mill Valley, San Jose, and Fremont.
If I had it to do all over again, I would probably have stretched the sessions to 90 minutes, offering each person 20 minutes of sweet spot listening, followed by a half hour or so of discussion. I hadn’t anticipated the appetite for discussing! It seems that when audiophiles get together, they want to chat almost as much as they want to listen. Great!
Finally, a big thank you to Alón and Larry for handling the organizational efforts! It wouldn’t have been possible without them.
Looking forward to the next one!
Fred