In what is sure to be a win-win situation for both manufacturers and consumers, Fine Sounds SpA of Milan, Italy, owner of Sonus Faber, Audio Research Corporation and Wadia Digital, has acquired 100% of Sumiko manufacturing and distribution in Berkeley, CA. In addition to distributing Wadia Digital next month, Sumiko will continue to distribute Sonus Faber loudspeakers, REL subwoofers, Pro-Ject Audio Systems turntables and electronics, SME turntables and tonearms, Sumiko phono cartridges, and Okki Nokki record cleaning machines in North America.

Trumpeter-composer David Weiss calls his quintet Point of Departure, an intriguing but risky move from the get-go. That's the title, after all, of Andrew Hill's 1964 Blue Note masterpiece, one of the most appealingly adventurous sessions in post-bop jazz. In short, Weiss has set the bar high. The startling thing is, he clears it.

The band's new CD, Snuck Out (on the Sunnyside label), is a terrific album, one of my very favorites so far this year. Its melodic lines swirl in catchy cascades without quite settling into melodies. Its free-style rhythms are tethered to a structure of harmony while floating clear of strict chords. The music's tight, loose, catchy, elusive, knotty and limber, all at once. The musicians (in addition to Weiss, J.D. Allen on tenor sax, Nir Felder on guitar, Matt Clohesy on bass, Jamire Williams on drums) are first-rate. The sound, engineered by Paul Cox, is crisp and airy.

This story originally appeared at InnerFidelity.com

Ask any headphone geek that's been around for a while for a recommendation between $100 and $200, and there's a very good chance the Audio Technica ATH-M50 will be the first thing out of their mouth.

With good reason, if you ask me, let's check them out.

... may have been fairly small as these things go, with just 28 exhibitor rooms, which is way fewer than THE Show Newport Beach a month ago. However, that is still 6 more rooms than the Axpona NYC just two weeks ago, with about the same number of marquee brands, in a hotel with generally better-sounding rooms than New York's Affinia. Show organizer Gary Gill, shown here giving away the prizes at the first of the nightly raffles, took a big gamble moving last year's intimate show into a hotel venue, but it seemed to have worked: both exhibitors and attendees seemed very upbeat about the event. Attendance on Saturday evening was a hair short of 700, meaning that possibly 900 or even 1000 people had packed the rooms of the Rockville Crowne Plaza by the time the Show closed Sunday evening.

Are regional shows like Gary's the future of the audio market, as Classic Speakers' John Wolff believes, or will we return to the days when there were just one or at most two large shows each year? That is going to depend on the resources of audio manufacturers and retailers and their willingness to spend more time on the road. But the 2011 Capital AudioFest certainly proved that if you hold it, audiophiles will come.

The larger of the two JS Audio rooms featured Wilson Sasha W/P speakers driven by Dan D'Agostino's new Momentum monoblock amplifiers. Source was either a Sooloos system or the Sound Devices digital recorder belonging to Wilson's Peter McGrath (pictured standing on that hotel carpet), both feeding data to Meridian's 808 Mk.3 CD player/digital processor, which also controlled playback volume. My hurriedly scrawled notes say that the Sooloos feed was via Ethernet, but don't hold me to that; the Sound Devices was definitely S/PDIF. The cabling was all Nordost Odin, which may well have cost more than everything else in the system, and the source components sat on a Harmonic Recovery Systems rack, which all involved said was a major contributor to the quality of the sound in this room.

And OMG, the sound! Whether it was Peter McGrath's hi-rez recordings or commercial material like Yello's "Stay," you were mainlining the music. Peter asked if he could play some of my hi-rez recordings, and played first the Cantus performance of Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque in 24/88.2k fidelity. I was transported to the Sauder Auditorium at Goshen College in Indiana, with the acoustic wrapped around me. The system did subtlety. Peter then played the 24/88.2k master of Attention Screen's "Blizzard Limbs," from Live at Merkin Hall. Again, the acoustic wrapped round me but the drum transients were more startling than I have ever heard before. And I mastered the recording!

I have heard Wilson Sashas in a number of systems, and yes, they are "fast," in that the bass doesn't boom or blur. Yes, the Nordost Odin is extraordinarily transparent cable (at a price) and that Meridian player's D/A is top-rank. And that HRS rack is a black hole for vibrations. But driven by the Dan D'Agostino amps—wow, did the Sashas kick some awesome booty! Without ever sounding crass or lacking in subtlety.

"The Voice That Is" is the name of a Newtown Square, PA, retailer and when I walked into their room, I had no idea what equipment I was listening to, as it was—again—totally dark! (I had to set my camera's "film speed" to a noisy 1600 to get a photo at all.) But the music playing, Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Tin Pan Alley" took me back a quarter century, when all you heard at audio shows was this cut. But it never sounded this good back then!

As my eyes accommodated to the darkness, I could make two pairs of Tidal speakers, the floorstanding Piano Diaceras ($37,690/pair) behind stand-mounted Ameas ($18.990/pair). Both feature ceramic-cone woofers and a diamond-dome tweeter but it was the Diaceras that were playing, connected with Argento cable to a Tidal Impact 140Wpc stereo amplifier ($35,990) and a Tidal Preas preamp ($27,990). Source was a MacBook Pro feeding USB data to a dCS Debussy D/A (my current reference, it shall be said, though in May I loaned it to Erick Lichte, who doesn't appear to want to send it back any time soon).

As if to confirm that it was 1987, the next track played was "Le temps passé" from the Michel Jonasz CD L'Histoire de Monsieur Swing. This is what I am talking about—a huge, stable soundstage, extending way beyond the speaker positions; smooth, grain-free highs, tight, tuneful, deep lows, and a pure, coloration-free midrange—and all of this in service of the music, adding to the experience instead of substituting for it. It doesn't get much better than this!

The engineer in me just doesn't get the products from AudioNote UK. Unprepossessing, two-way speakers that cost a lot of money; non-oversampling digital products that cost a lot of money; single-ended triode amplifiers that cost even more. But the musician in me makes sure I always check out the AudioNote room at an audio Show—a fine time is guaranteed for all!

Such it was at AudioFest 2011. When I walked in, David Cope (left) was playing a CD of the Rachmaninov cello sonata on the AudioNote CD4.1X player ($10,500). Amplification was being provided by the AudioNote Jinro integrated amplifier that Art Dudley reviewed in April 2011 ($26,500). Speakers were the AudioNote Lexus Signatures, the fourth rung up the ladder on modification of what was once was the original Snell Model E ($16,250/pair; this speaker has external crossovers whereas the three less-expensive models don't). It was with a definite sense of loss that the Rachmaninov movement came to an end. Makes you think. Made me think. Something is going on but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Atkinson?

The Highwater Sound room at the Atlanta Axpona had been one of Stephen Mejias's favorites: "I felt as though I were in a concert hall, gripped by the music, by the space around me, by the physical motions of musicians striking, plucking, and bowing their gorgeous instruments. There was a certain sacredness to the scene, a sense that what was taking place should not and could not be disturbed," he wrote. Unfortunately, by the time I got to that room on Sunday, Highwater's Jeffrey Catalano was already striking the system, so I made sure I had plenty of time to visit the Highwater room at Capital AudioFest.

Capital AudioFest organizer Gary Gill is a fine jazz trombonist, as I found out when we both sat in with Steve Davis's band at the Atlanta Axpona in April. To remind Showgoers what the real thing sounds like, Gary's quintet performed Saturday evening in the hotel's bar. This is Gary in full song, but not shown in my photo are the, not one but two Theremin players who sat in on some songs.