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The show was scheduled to open at 10am today (April 12), but at 9:55am there was already a line of people at the registration desk. AXPONA looks on track to replace CES as the premier audio show in North America.

In the middle of AXPONA's annual pre-show industry reception, held Thursday evening in the huge Schaumburg Ballroom of the Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center, Paul Miller (on the right in the photo above), Director of AVTech Media/AVTech Media Americas—which publishes Stereophile, AudioStream, InnerFidelity, AnalogPlanet, Sound & Vision, and the UK's Hi-Fi News & Record Review (amongst other properties)—unexpectedly took to the stage . . .

Last year, American audio shows felled more than ten million 100'-tall trees—just for their ink-on-paper floor plans. They had to reopen two nuclear power plants just to keep the elevators running in Las Vegas. The Chicago River backed up like a toilet—clogged by discarded show guides. This year, all you need is a smart phone, the the AXPONA app—and the stamina to visit almost two hundred rooms filled with some of the world's finest, most exciting, new audio products. Are you ready?

It's been a long time since we've seen a really new tweeter design. Only five basic types have ever been developed: cones, domes, panels, ribbons, and ionic plasmas. And the most recent of these—the long-defunct DuKane "blue-glow" Ionovac—was introduced 40 years ago. Since then, tweeter development has been more evolutionary than revolutionary, a series of refinements that has made them more efficient, more reliable, and smoother and more extended in response.

Stereophile’s moment-to-moment coverage of the largest audio show in North America is about to begin.

One evening late last summer I took the most expensive workout of my life. In my hurry to meet a friend at the gym, I left the house, leaving my computer and hi-fi on despite the ominous look of the sky. In the South, experience teaches you to dash about disconnecting everything at the first sign of a thunderstorm. Usually I do, but this time my mind was elsewhere.

Philip Glass (b. 1937) may not quite be a household name in America, but he's surely as well-known as any living classical composer, and the repetitive minimalism that is the hallmark of his music has influenced everything from rock music to TV commercials. Still, after 5 decades of composing, it took a commission from Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion for Glass to write his first concerto for percussion ensemble, Perpetulum—"What took them so long to ask me?" Glass has said about the commission. TCP has just released the premiere recording of the 21:23 minute concerto on their new 2-CD set, Perpetulum (OM 0132), from Glass's own label, Orange Mountain Music. The recording, which was engineered in 24/96, is also available as a download with those specifications.