There was one room at AXPONA where I was too in awe to take notes. In shock is more like it. The brothers who own JS Audio have acquired and restored the very first pair of WAMM loudspeakers that the late Dave Wilson began to manufacture in 1981. It seems that after living with the model for a few months, Dave's other half in the truest sense, his beloved wife and life partner Sheryl Lee preferred a different cabinet color for their living room and encouraged him to move this pair along. (If I've got that wrong, please forgive me.)

Having reviewed the top-of-the-line Innuos two-piece Statement music server, I was eager to hear an A/B demo of the version I reviewed with an Innuos Statement that contains its forthcoming Next-Gen power supply upgrade. Thanks to two extremely helpful and enthusiastic Innuos staff people, Director of Sales Steven Gomes and North American Director of Sales, Kevin Jackson, it was easy to hear the improvements.

Tucked away in a corner of the 6th floor were two Fidelity Imports rooms showing a few new gems. Fidelity Imports focused one (room 604) on its imports from the UK.

Fidelity Imports' second room showed on passive display the latest speaker from Perlisten, the three-way S5t tower, a smaller sibling to the Perlisten S7t in the active setup (and that Kal Rubinson reviewed in December 2021, bottom photo). A (forthcoming) new Aurender A15 music server/streamer with DAC (top photo) decoding full MQA served as the source.

Toronto-based American Sound of Canada, with Angie Lisi at the helm, had a striking showing at AXPONA: Huge horns. If you saw and heard them, you'd remember them. It was a popular room, so I made an early first stop on Sunday when it wasn't crowded.

American Sound presented a second demo in the suite's smaller room: Avantgarde Acoustics' Uno XDs, a smaller model soon to be upgraded to G3 status, driven by Japan's Phasemation amplification.

When I heard Usher's "Yeah!" being blasted out from the, uh, Serenity Room, I wondered whether to go in or hang back from the crunk. Not hating on the song, but it was awfully early in the day for this. (It turns out there was someone shooting a video in there.) But the real surprise was that the bumping, club-worthy music wasn't coming from outsized tower speakers, but from a pair of stand-mounted two-ways with some innovative porting.

Do we need yet another unearthed recording of the Bill Evans trio? I count 22 albums or boxed sets—a total of 49 polycarbonate or vinyl discs—of posthumously released sessions, many of them in just the last few years. But this latest discovery, recorded in Buenos Aires in September 1979, is a stunner. So, to answer the question above: Yes, we do need this recording.

Some would call it a tease; others would call it sheer torture. That's how I, who fell in love with the sound of Stereophile's 2021 Amplification Component of the Year, Gryphon's Essence monoblock power amplifier, felt seeing a static display in place of hearing the new, humongous Gryphon Apex power amplifier ($99,000/chassis).