Capital AudioFest 2024

I ain't no digital techie. Big headphones and me? Never gonna happen. But these guys from Warwick Acoustics, Martin Roberts and Orazio Pollaci, they've got a certain je ne sais quoi. We were knocking back drinks in the packed Hilton bar, and they were so damn charming, I ended up in their room. What a night. What a blast.

Warwick Acoustics had two setups on active display. One, the flagship Aperio system featuring their headphones’ Balanced Drive HPEL Transducer, a symmetrically driven variant of the company’s High Precision Electrostatic Laminate transducer. Each one of these DAC/headphone amp systems takes 50 person-hours to assemble. Aperio will set you back $40k. Sharing the same table was the entry-level Bravura system, priced at $7k. I jacked myself into the Aperio, poked some tunes on the iPad, and listened.

This is the essence of the rabbit hole, where something new and exciting overcomes expectation and you begin to scheme, “if I sell this and don’t pay that, all of this can be mine!”

Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile” sounded full and moist, trapped inside my head, sounding like they’d been recorded yesterday. Never had the drums popped and grooved like this. Dylan sounded reborn, equal parts serpent and saint. Father John Misty lost a little magic without my vinyl and tubes back home, but Bibio’s atmospheric wizard music filled my skull with sound to the brim. A damn fine listen.