The International Audio Show is organized by the major Japanese audio importers and is held at the Tokyo Forum,  conveniently located in the center of Tokyo. Our main system comprised a Viola Cadenza pre-amplifier alternately driving a pair of Viola Forte 75W mono blocks and a Viola Bravo 350W stereo power amplifier with a pair of Viola Allegro speakers coupled with the Basso passive sub-woofers.

This was the first outing of the final version of the new Allegro and Basso speakers and they attracted quite a bit of interest, much to designer Paul Jayson's satisfaction.

It was also the first official demonstration of the Viola Forte 75W mono power amplifiers. These are the two small boxes in the picture above. They were easily able to drive the Allegros to high levels yet showed no sign of strain. 

The Viola Quartet 4-band mono electronic cross-over was also the subject of much interest.  As the product was commissioned by our Japanese distributor this is not too surprising.  A significant number of Japanese audiophile still run high-end multi-amped speakers.

The picture of Nishikawa-san on the left was taken during one of the many Viola demonstrations he conducted during the show and not during a karaoke session.

The show was a great success for us and we thank all of Nishikawa-san's staff for making this possible.  They put in huge amount of work in the weeks before the show to prepare everything in meticulous detail and continued to work long hours throughout the show. Special thanks are due to the three staff who we worked most closely with during our visit.
 

Whilst we were in Japan we took the opportunity to do some dealer training.  Here Viola's Paul Jayson demonstrates the most effective position to assume when asking for quick delivery of product from Viola.

Actually he was setting up the Viola Spirito modular preamplifier, which is the unit on top of the audio rack.

As well as playing CDs during our demonstrations, we also played good old fashioned records. We used the amazing Continuum Audio Labs Caliburn analog player shown below with its designer Mark Doemann. The sound was truly high-end as, was the price at something over $100,000. One of the good things about this machine is that it makes our products look affordable.

Joking aside, it is the best sounding analogue player we have heard. It is also an extremely clever design, with a lot of serious engineering effort incorporated into it.