LATEST ADDITIONS

Last year in the large Schaumburg F air-walled room in the Convention Center, Stenheim, VTL, and Nordost put together one of the finest sounding rooms I’ve heard at any show. This year, the sound was again among the best I encountered in the over 40 rooms I auditioned.

Steve Jain and his Fidelity Imports crew presented six rooms at AXPONA, stuffed with debut products from across the world.

"I think both moving coil and moving magnet cartridges are terrible." That's what legendary Canadian audio designer Ed Meitner told me when I asked about the pioneering transimpedance current drive phono stage he created for his Meitner PA6 preamp some 40 years ago.

Meitner has been designing innovative hi-fi gear for the pro and consumer audio markets for more than 50 years, but for most of the last 30, he has been best known for his work with high-resolution digital audio and DSD recording. Despite this focus on digital—and despite that comment about the two leading phono cartridge technologies—deep in his heart, Ed still loves analog and has fond memories of the Kenwood optical cartridges from the 1970s, which I discussed in last month's Spin Doctor column. So when Ed read that a company in Japan called DS Audio was bringing back an improved version of the optical cartridge using modern materials, he contacted designer Tetsuaki Aoyagi to learn more.

Rich Pinto of Treehaus Audiolab, which is based in Southport, Connecticut, has been dedicated to developing SET amplifiers and high-efficiency speakers since 2017. Here at AXPONA, he introduces the A/Machines 300B monoblock amplifiers ($39,000/pair), which showcase his commitment to classic design, in the sound and the aesthetics.

To say that I had good memories of the Luxman-Magico room at an earlier AXPONA would be an understatement.

Brian Damkroger’s recent review of the T+A Solitaire S 530 was laudatory. I was eager to hear it.

It was hard to tell where distributor / dealer Next Level HiFi ended and Audio Group Denmark began. Or, vice-versa), it was equally hard to tell if more action was taking place in the room during the demo or in the hallway. Suffice to say, there was a lot of energy flowing, and all that talking made listening a challenge.