Audio Pori - a dealer visit
In addition to the city of Helsinki - and perhaps Hyvinkää - there is a triangle of three towns in Finland: Turku, Tampere and Pori, inside of which more than proportional number of Finnish audiophiles have their homes and systems. At one corner of the triangle is Audio Pori.
Audio Pori is a major HiFi dealer on the west coast of Finland. It has customers all around the Southern Finland and further up in the north, but most of its clients come from the large economic region around Pori.
Audio Pori represents numerous distinguished brands such as Audiovector, B&W, Magnepan, Mark&Daniel, Marten, System Audio, Whaferdale (loudspeakers); Arcam, Audiolab, Consonance, McIntosh, Musical Fidelity, Marantz, NAD etc. (amplifiers and digital players). Finnish loudspeakers from Amphion to Aurelia, from Harrinkaiutin to Forvoice are also well represented.
The guys at Audio Pori stress that they're not after a wide selection per se, and that they choose everything that they sell by their ears and heart: "open-minded alternatives to those who want quality".
Proximity of the importer Sound Proof is immediately obvious: Ascendo loudspeakers can be seen here and there, and AMR's exclusive amplifiers and cd-players dignify equipment racks.
At the time of my visit, Ascendo Series C-7 was driven by a McIntosh amplifier, and System F with one of ASR's Emitter amps. ASR is one of the brands that Audio Pori imports itself, the other being Trigon. The system played loud without distortion. The sound was fairly balanced, forceful but not boomy. There appears to be something very interesting about the bass of Ascendo speaker; I wish I can put my mind and pen on it at some point.
AMR & ASR - cool!
Another tube amp I found from Audio Pori - Mastersound from Italy.
At Audio Pori, they are very principled about where the AC comes from. This is Corfac's isolation transformer, and helps to keep the AC voltage constantly within 1 volt.
At the back stage ...
The wall facing the entrance.
