AXPONA 2025

As the former owner of an Aragon 8008 power amplifier, I was curious to see how the company’s products have evolved. I used to admire the amp’s V-shaped heatsinks and felt lucky to own it. It was the second high-end amplifier I bought, and a major upgrade over the bright-sounding Adcom that came before it.

AXPONA provided the opportunity to speak with Rick Santiago, who, with business partner Ted Moore, bought Aragon from Klipsch. Santiago—now CEO and co-owner of Indy Audio Labs, which designs and manufactures Aragon and Acurus gear—studied Mike Kusiak’s original Aragon circuits and, in his words, “moved them into the modern era.”

“They’re still fully discrete designs with the same giant-size power capacitors, but we’ve modernized the designs for better performance,” Santiago explained. “We continue to manufacture our products in the United States, where we also make our own circuit boards.”

Serious listening wasn’t possible due to a demo taking place in the adjoining room, but I took a long look at Aragon’s Tungsten preamp in silver ($20,000), with its 5" color touchscreen, DSP options, and one-, two-, and three-way fully adjustable crossovers. Also present were Iridium class-AB 400W monoblocks in silver ($13,000/each) and a Titanium class-AB 200W dual-mono stereo amplifier ($13,000). The system further included Totem Element Metal V2 speakers, whose prices will go up from $17,850/pair to $20,000/pair due to Trump tariffs, and a Lumin U2 transport/streamer ($5000).

In a separate setup adjacent to the main Aragon–Totem system, Totem introduced the Tribe Tower Thunderbird ($13,500/pair in satin finish; $15,000/pair in premium high-gloss finish with four-way WBT connectors). A dual-ported 2-way loudspeaker, it employs two 6" Torrent Technology low-resonance woofers with no crossover in their path, a 1.3" graphene-dome tweeter mounted to a 0.25"-thick machined-aluminum faceplate, and monocoque cabinetry free of parallel surfaces. Frequency response is claimed as 28.5Hz–29kHz (±3dB). Find out more about the system in this video featuring Vince Bruzzese from Totem.