Classic Audio Loudspeakers' John Wolff, along with his red shirt, the parrots that perch on his speakers, and the reproductions of Nipper he offers for sale, is a fixture at regional audio shows. When I asked him about this, he responded that he believes regional shows are the future of this industry. John was using Atma-Sphere tube electronics, including M-60 monoblocks, to drive his 4'-tall T-3.4 speaker, which uses a wood radial Tractrix midrange horn fitted with a 4" beryllium-diaphragm compression driver firing into a 2" throat, coupled with twin 15" woofers—one firing forward, the other to the floor—and a supertweeter. The midrange unit and woofers all use field-coil–energized magnets.

"Concrete is toxic to the sound of speakers!" explained Mapleshade's Pierre Sprey, when I asked about the maple platforms and brass footers on which everything was standing in his room at Capital AudioFest. Pierre makes superbly natural-sounding recordings, but also lives in a world where everything matters when it comes to optimizing sound quality. The system comprised Sonist Concerto 4 speakers ($5895/pair), these a 97dB-sensitive design with a solid poplar front baffle, driven by a heavily modified vintage tubed Scott integrated amplifier. (Pierre has been buying up used examples of this amp since 1989 and offers the modded amps for sale—see his website.) Source was a modded Cyrus CD-8SE CD player (the bottom panel was now maple) and preamp was a Kora Triode.

Whether it was Pierre's fanatic attention to detail that no-one else considers important, or maybe he is just an expert at setting up systems. But the Sonist speakers sounded very much better than the Concerto 4s and smaller versions that I heard at the Atlanta and Jacksonville Axpona Shows: clean, transparent, and uncolored.

. . .has to be zero, to judge by how Pierre Sprey dresses his speaker wires!

The Surreal Sound Speaker ($10,000/pair) is the small, three-way floorstander finished in cherry, not the massive bass bin behind it, which belongs to the GOTO Horns speaker (see next story). Surreal Sound's Ralph Helmer is passionate about midrange, feeling it is in the midrange where the music truly lives. To that end, his speaker features a beryllium-disc midrange unit, mounted in an open baffle. A Heil Air Motion Transfomer supertweeter and three spider-less, aluminum-alloy, 10" cone drivers for the bass, all also mounted in open baffles, complete the drive-unit line-up. Mr; Helmer believes that one of the advantages of his dipole speakers is their high Wife-Acceptance Favor, in that they are smaller than expected for same amount of bass.

These $150k/pair monsters weren't playing either time I went into this room. But they win the prize for most "Awesome-Looking Speaker at the Show." And there's my favorite hotel carpet again!

One of the Command Performance AV rooms at Capital AudioFest featured Carnegie speakers, the CST-2 ($5999/pair), which combines a Mylar-film planar tweeter with eight 5.25" composite-cone woofers in a slim tower supported on a marble base. The speakers were driven by Manley Mahi EL84 monoblocks and a Manley 300B preamp, with the source a silent CommandPC server feeding 352.8kHz USB data to the Light Harmonic Da Vinci DAC that had impressed at the Atlanta Axpona. The DAC has been upgraded since Axpona: when handling 16-bit data, it would pad out bits 17–24 with 0s to give 24-bit data, which is standard practice. But in 2s-complement digital arithmetic, which is how audio data are encoded on a CD, there are actually two zero levels: 16 0s but also 16 1s, which represents a magnitude one LSB lower. Light Harmonic's engineers found that if they padded 16-bit data with 8 1s rather than 8 0s, the sound improved.

This room was pitch-black when I went in, so, sitting in the listening chair, I held my camera over my head, crossed my fingers and my heart, and pressed the shutter. What the flash revealed was a nicely finished pair of 2-way towers, the Carnegie CST-1s ($1999/pair) driven by an Onkyo Reference M-5000R 150Wpc amplifier. The CST-1 combines a 1"x3" Mylar-film planar tweeter with two 5.25" composite-cone woofers in a transmission-line enclosure. Carnegie's Ron May asked if I would like to hear some Nils Lofgren but to my surprise, he didn't select the track "Keith Don't Go" from the Acoustic Live CD, which has been a fixture at recent audio Shows. Instead he played me "A New Shoulder to Cry On," which sounded excellent. Carnegie is designing its products for the "Affordable Audiophile," an admirable goal.

The Audience room was featuring the Clairaudient 2+2s ($5000/pair) when I popped in for a listen. This speaker features four metal-cone units, two on the front two on the back, operated full-range, and reinforced by a passive bass radiator on one of the speaker's sides. Brian Damkroger enthused about the clarity conferred by the absence of a crossover when he reviewed the speaker in the July 2011 issue, but I was less keen on its balance, finding it very forward. Both aspects was readily apparent at Capital AudioFest, though I admit the room's acoustics were problematic. This is definitely a speaker that you must audition for yourself.

This room was packed each time I poked my nose in, so I didn't get much of a listen. The company's website—www.cathedralspeakers.com—explains that "Once you hear your favorite music on a pair of Cathedrals, you will never go back to ordinary speakers." Driven by kit versions of AudioNote tube amplifiers, the big, two-way Cathedrals feature Eminence woofers in enclosures fabricated from hardwoods rather than the usual fiberboard, and produced an equally big sound. Price is $6995/pair for the Model 3113 being demmed, which has an Altec 811-B horn, $7995 /pair for the 7117, which has an Altec 511-B horn.

"Where's the tweeter?" I asked after a listen to the 97dB-sensitive Soundfield speakers, shown at Capital AudioFest in prototype form. It turned out the top drive-unit is a 12" coaxial unit, with the HF unit mounted where the dust-cap would be. "So the big-ass 18" dipole unit is the subwoofer?" No, it was explained, the18" unit in the speaker's center, behind the grille, is the woofer, covering the range from 50–200Hz. The bottom 12" unit, mounted in a sealed enclosure is the subwoofer, handling frequencies below 50Hz. With the coaxial and 18" drivers operating as dipoles and the bottom12" unit omnidirectional, by varying the crossover between the low-frequency drivers, the speaker's radiation pattern can be made cardioid in the region where room acoustics might benefit. I had seen a cardioid subwoofer designed by Ken Kantor many years ago at a CES, and had wondered why no-one else had experimented along these lines.