AXPONA 2023

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.

Did it sound unbalanced and disjointed? Not on your life. President and founder Bill Dudleston, a pioneer in room correction, knew the setup would work thanks to his Legacy Wavelet, an electronic slayer of reflected sound, nasty time delays, and other room-induced colorations. But the Wavelet is more than that. Let us count the ways: it houses the already-mentioned room correction module, a preamplifier, a four-way crossover with time alignment, and a high-quality DAC. (The preamp and DAC are bypassable if you wish to supply your own.) Also on board: 1500 Watts of ICEpower amplification for the LFE drivers. The system retails for $62,000.

Not included are power amps to drive the midrange transducers and the ribbon tweeters. Team Dudleston had brought the four-channel Legacy i.V4 Ultra amplifier ($8700), capable of monstrous power: 610Wpc into 8 ohms, 1000Wpc into 4.

I spent most of my time in the Legacy room listening to the 6'-tall V speakers. Via these four-way dipoles with passive bass radiators, transients emerged fast and effortlessly, and bass notes (down to a subterranean 16Hz!) had real heft and a ton of punch.

On a good system, Yosi Horikawa's "Bubbles," an audiophile chestnut I never tire of, makes the bouncing marbles and pebbles on the recording skitter all over the room. The Legacy Vs rendered the effect with extreme precision. Unintended comedy occurred thanks to a version of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" sung by the King's Singers, a niminy-piminy English choral group. The incongruousness of these prim British gentlemen requesting coitus from "the whores on Seventh Avenue" tickled my funny bone; there's a cool Mr. Bean sketch in there somewhere.

But did the track sound excellent? Hell yeah, and no one in their right mind could deny it.