"Aretai teamed up with Benchmark Media Systems and Grimm Audio, which made for a great combination, both in the resulting sound quality and in the no-nonsense setup."
"I feel like I’m a skipping record. This will be the third time we’ve written about a room featuring Aretai speakers. First time was at Audio Video Show 2022 in Warsaw, Poland, where Doug Schneider was extremely impressed by this Latvian company we’d never heard of."
"The Contra 200F is a modestly sized floorstander, and it’s armed with two 8″ woofers, one facing the rear. The two woofers are tuned differently, which makes this a 3.5-way speaker."
"This system presented huge, effortless, bottom-feeding, dinosaur bass. At one point, Irbe played a track that blasted bass with a wavelength far longer than the room, setting up a cabin-gain flutter that made me feel nauseous—in a good way. Smooth on top, but extended, with a natural-sounding midrange. This was a great system, working with superb electronics."
"In the lobby bar on Thursday night, John Siau, vice president and director of engineering at Benchmark Media Systems, and Doug Schneider spent a good hour discussing esoteric (to me) details of digital audio processing. For the most part, I tuned them out and worked on my beer, but I did absorb enough information to realize that I was listening to someone who really, truly understands the technology that underpins his products."
"The system in the DreamScapes A/V room consisted of two Benchmark AHB2 power amplifiers fed from a Benchmark HPA4 preamp. The source was a Grimm Audio MU2 streaming DAC."
- Jason Thorpe, Senior Editor, SoundStage!
