I will never thow a meet of this size, that requires you to send your gear 1500 miles. I am lucky if I spent 3 hour listening total the entire weekend. I am too tired to discuss any of the impressions I have at the moment, maybe tonight. The one thing I will say is the Smyth Research surround sound technology was the highlight of the daytime hours of the meet. It is very cool technology and does truly provide surround sound as if you were listening to a 5.1 system through speakers. They had an xbox 360 in the main room. When I first started to play I found myself turning and looking behind me to see if there was a speaker there. No matter how many times I looked there was no speaker. In the Smyth Research room they had a cool demo set up.
First they put some type of smail IEM in your ears, and then put the Stax headphone over your ears. They play sounds through each channel instructing you to turn to look at the center speaker, then right, then left (I'm probably combining steps). Once that is done, the demo begins. First is with music, then a movie. The headphones have a small transmitter on the top of the headphones. As you turn your head in between the two front speakers (if you go beyond either speaker, the sound cuts out, which is the way it is supposed to work), the orientation of each speaker (front, back and center) holds which wouldn't happen if listening to speakers. The demo is setup so that if you take the headphones off and point the transmitter at a 45 degree angle it goes to speakers so you can a/b the two systems. I'm not sure you need the speakers unless you are listening with others. It is that good.
A huge thanks to Vicki, Gene, Matt, Jp, and Dom for all your help over the last 7 or 8 months and at the meet.