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If you wanted to hear an admirably smooth, solid, all-of-one-piece system with a huge soundstage and extremely fast and firm bass, Ed DeVito's Audio-Ultra exhibit was one of the best to visit. It was also the only room where you could hear CH Precision gear with the latest upgrades and the diminutive Magico A1 standmount loudspeakers ($9400/pair in silver finish).

While audiophiles kvetch over the future of this thing we love, rest assured, young audiophiles are growing in number, evidenced by AXPONA halls streaming with under-30 types. Upscale Audio's Kevin Deal, one of the savviest of distributors, introduced me to his young Analog Manager, Kat Ourlian, who discussed specs and brought two terrific-sounding LPs to play on a tricked-out PrimaLuna/Tannoy system.

With the assumption of audiophile Cliff Duffey (above) as President of AXISS Audio USA (aka AXISS Distribution Inc.), and the addition of T.J. Goldsby as Vice President of Sales and Dealer relations, the company has added more lines than can comfortably fit into a headline.

Industry legend Paul Barton has been designing speakers for more than half a century. He's also quite the speaker himself.

I'd sauntered into the Lenbrook room to check out Barton's new PSB Synchrony T800 floorstanders (PSB is a Lenbrook brand). My visit was serendipitously timed. Not only was the man himself present; he and I, along with the gregarious Joe Corona of Chicago retailer Saturday Audio Exchange, were the only ones left when the doors closed at 6pm. We settled in. Corona provided slices of coffee cake, and Barton supplied wisdom and bon mots.

On the Renaissance hotel's 16th floor, in the room occupied by PureAudioProject, folks were utterly baffled. Also, occasionally horny.

Apologies. The fact that I'm away from home for four, five days to cover AXPONA means I temporarily don't have my teenage offspring to mortify with dad humor, so now I'm inflicting it on you. PureAudioProject, you see, makes open-baffle speakers. Some have horns. There's a reason I write for Stereophile, not Saturday Night Live.

I'm an unabashed Audio Note fanboy. You got a problem with that? Audio Note lives deep in not only my sonic soul (an Audio Note M2 Pre was my first serious hi-fi purchase), but those of colleagues Herbert Reichert and Michael Trei, Audio Note distributors back in the 1990s, when tubes were cheap and the only thing Upscale Audio's Kevin Deal sold!

Audio Note returned to AXPONA with nothing to new to spring on the hungry (really) crowds, only the same consistency of sound major domo Peter Qvortrup has offered for decades.

As I think I wrote somewhere, it's one thing to hear equipment at a show, another thing to hear it at home. I meant to imply that, of course, at home is the only way to truly hear a piece, in your reference system.

But at AXPONA, where George Counnas (center) and Carolyn Counnas (right) debuted their new Zesto Audio Eros 500 Select KT-150 equipped, class-A monoblocks, with Zesto Audio's Leto Ultra II preamp, which I reviewed in January 2021, I was flummoxed at the beauty of sound, extravagance of liquidity and detail, and nearly spiritual physicality the system endowed to a variety of music.