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How does anyone adequately and fairly evaluate a first-time audio show in a new location? Especially when it's handicapped by unusually hot, mid-90º weather and yet another COVID surge that was accompanied by admonishments to mask up indoors?

First, I rejoice that the show brought together so many old friends in such a convivial manner. A case in point: Marjorie Baumert, head of the former Rocky Mountain International Audio Fest (left above), headed west from Denver to support show organizers Gary Gill (right above) and Lou Hinkley (hard at work elsewhere) as volunteer coordinator. With such heart helping to guide the operation, the feeling in rooms and hallways was as positive as it gets.

As at T.H.E. Show in Long Beach, I was smitten by the round, colorful, and illumined sound of Thrax Spartacus 300B monoblocks ($97,500/pair). Seduced, won over, serenaded into submission. And then some.

If any company's sonic signature has changed from the first time I encountered it, it's Dan Wright's ModWright. While Dan still does tube modifications to products from other companies—his Cambridge CXN V2 Tube Modification ($1500/mod only) to the Cambridge DAC was part of the show system—the KWH225i class-AB Hybrid Integrated ($9750), PH9.0X Tube Phono Stage ($4750), and world debut Analog Bridge (maybe $2900/TBD) are 100% ModWright.

The email read, in part, like an equipment list with Herb Reichert's name on it. The room had one raison d'être: to showcase Pure AudioProject's Trio15 Classic open-baffle speaker ($9740/pair), which includes a Voxativ AC-PiFe wooden-cone center driver and three 15" woofers custom-manufactured for PureAudioProject by Eminence. To do so, Ze'ev (Wolf) Schlik paired his speaker with Pass Labs' INT-25 integrated amplifier ($7500) and XP-17 phono preamp ($4300), the Denafrips Terminator Plus DAC ($6400), and VPI Industries' Avenger turntable ($12,000) with Shyla cartridge ($2000).

The setting is surreal. As you drive into the Satsop Business Park in rural Elma, Washington (pop. 3500, max), eyes immediately fixate on the looming 481'-tall cooling towers of an abandoned nuclear facility. Remnants of the largest nuclear power plant construction project in the United States, the site was mothballed in 1983, in part due to concerns triggered by reports of what had happened at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island four years earlier.

When I entered the room shared by Ken Stevens' CAT (Convergent Audio Technology) and Michael D. Griffin's ESP (Essential Sound Products), recording engineers/life partners Jim Anderson (above) and Ulrike Schwarz were finishing up a talk/demonstration about recording Patricia Barber's album Clique. They are not the only world-class engineers I've encountered who, standing well to the side and above speakers' tweeters, played tracks so loud that voice and instruments spread and distorted. But in soft passages, and once they'd turned the volume down, the beautiful liquidity of the CAT sound, the superb engineering, and the excellent dynamics of system and recording alike came through for all to relish.

Since 1995, Michael Griffin's Essential Sound Products (ESP) has focused on manufacturing quality power cables for audiophiles. Then, starting with its Music Cord, Michael began manufacturing cords for musicians and recording studios. Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz, for example, use ESP power cables in their recording projects.