Magico turns 20 this year, but founder and chief designer Alon Wolf isn’t the type for gauzy remembrances. In Magicoland, looking ahead beats looking back, so we’ll have to marvel some other time at how the Californian brand has shot to the top of the high-end heap.
On the 12th floor of the Schaumburg Renaissance hotel, visitors found a cluster of Fidelity Imports rooms that highlighted one strong foreign brand after another.
In the late 1960s and the early years of the next decade, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, like many of his contemporaries, was listening to such albums as Miles Davis's Filles de Kilimanjaro and Miles in the Sky and pondering what it meant for his music. During this period, for better or worse, the rhythms and aggressive approach of rock music, including the use of electric rather than acoustic instruments, were mixing with jazz and giving birth to fusion. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that these two vital genres, both of which prize improvisationbe it on electric guitar or tenor saxophoneshould become each other's major influence. Jazz fusion based in jazz (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Tony Williams Lifetime, Return to Forever), and jazz rock based in rock (Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Soft Machine), evolved into major genres in the 1970s. From these tendrils, jazz pop, jazz funk, M-Base, and even smooth jazz have continued to spread.
YG Acoustics speakers were featured in several rooms at AXPONA 2024. The highlight for me was a room featuring the Carmel 3 speakers ($29,800 per pair), the entry point to the company's Reference range.
Ever since the announcement some two weeks ago, I've been eager to hear the SVS Ultra Evolution Pinnacle loudspeakers, which, at $2499 each—or, you guessed it, $4998/pair—are cheap in high-end terms but quite expensive for SVS.
In Schaumburg C, Rutherford Audio set up camp—and what a camp it was! Electronics by Accustic Arts, analog by Acoustic Signature and Vertere—two turntables—and loudspeakers by Stratton Acoustics, a speaker line I had not previously heard.
When I walked into this room, just before closing time on Sunday, the show’s last day, they were spinning vinyl. Two things are notable about that fact, at least to me.
What better way to start the first day of an audio show than with some light joyful music? In this case, it was with a 1974 LP, Heinz Holliger: Famous Oboe Concertos, on which the famous oboist joined players of the Dresden State Orchestra under Vittorio Negri for, among other works, Leclair’s Concerto in C for Oboe, Strings, and Continuo, Op. 7. In the first movement, the lively presentation complemented equally lively music, which cheerily zipped along.