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Colorado's Ayre Acoustics jammed a big system into a small room at APXONA, wall-to-wall attendees barely leaving space for Ayre's president, designer, and Chief Ayre-Head Ariel Brown to press the flesh and discuss the gear.

I probably spent much of my time at AXPONA with a severe case of resting bitch face, as I'm usually concentrating hard. There's a lot to cover, and a thousand facts to get straight. But during system auditions, I occasionally smiled too, sometimes unintentionally making eye contact with exhibitors who were excited to see that I was excited.

That's what happened in the Linkwitz room, where CEO Frank Brenner and noted Linkwitz evangelist Charles Port were demoing the company's LX521.4 open-baffle speakers.

One unusual thing in the large Legacy space at AXPONA was the placement of two pairs of beautiful-looking speakers: Legacy's V system and the Aeris. They stood in a straight line angled about 30° away from one of the long walls, albeit parallel to a curtain that the Legacy team had placed there. The grouping of equipment was also quite far over to the left of the room, instead of near the center of the wall.

When I first heard JMF Audio components from France at AXPONA 2022, I had no idea that, paired with the right speakers, they would produce heavenly sound. But in the room jointly sponsored by Fidelis Distribution, who handles Harbeth loudspeakers, and Audio Skies, which distributes JMF Audio and Ideon Audio, the mating of JMF with Harbeth delivered some of the finest-sounding music I heard at AXPONA 2023.

Electrocompaniet of Norway, too long absent from this writer's high-end radar, celebrated its 50th anniversary by showing the new AW 800M Nemo 2 800w monoblocks ($45,000/pair), EC 4.8 MKII reference preamp ($4900), EMC 1 MKV Reference CD player ($6800), ECM 1 MKII Media Center (a media player & streamer with DAC and preamp output, $5700), and ECP 2 MK II MM/MC phono amp ($2900). To celebrate the occasion, Lasse Danielsen, Sales and Marketing Director Electrocompaniet (left in photo) and Bjorn Kindingstad, company CEO (right), journeyed to AXPONA.

Harmonic Resolution Systems (HRS) unveiled its new, significantly less expensive EXR-1921-4V audio stand ($7795) at AXPONA. (I'd originally seen this stand at Definitive Audio's private Music Matters event in Seattle.) Put to good use in the Ultra Fidelis Room, it joined HRS's SXR-1921-5V audio stand ($11,550/frame), M3X2-1921 isolation base ($3995), R3X-1921 isolation base ($1975), and Vortex V150 isolation feet ($1630/set) to support a system that included Vandersteen M5HPA High Pass Amplifiers ($16,800/pair) and Kento Carbon loudspeakers ($41,700/pair)...

I'd encountered the pairing of room sponsor Nordost with VTL electronics and Stenheim loudspeakers in this very same room last year. But this time, with one more year to learn how to tame an extremely large, semi-intractable listening space, set-up wizard Stirling Trayle scored a bullseye.