Impossibly ambitious? Too many demands on the audience? Tommy done better? A final collapse before a glorious resurrection? 1971's Who's Next, which began life as a more-advanced-than-Tommy sci-fi rock opera called Life House (also called Lifehouse), is all that and more. All the elements of this oft-reissued opus have been remastered and reissued in several new configurations, the most complete being the Who's Next/Life House Super Deluxe Edition, which includes 10 CDs with 155 tracks sourced from the original tapes, 89 of them previously unreleased.

Not content to consistently produce some of the best sounding rooms at CAF year after year, Harry and Mat Weisfield changed up almost all their ancillary gear from 2022, but the sound remained fantastic.

Always a friendly face, yay, a calming presence as I crawl through show halls, Technics' Bill Voss was on hand to play music and talk shop in a space hosted by Overture Ultimate Home Theater Electronics of Wilmington, Delaware.

On A Higher Note’s Philip O’Hanlon is typically seen at shows playing unusual records while entertaining attendees with his charming storytelling and Irish brogue. This was something different.

If you're a fan of my Stereophile scribble, you know I don't consider myself a fan of stuff like DSP processing, digital amplification, spatial reconstruction, or active room correction—all of which play an important role with Bill Dudleston’s Legacy Audio loudspeakers.

Ampsandsound is perhaps best known for his amplifiers made to drive either headphones or loudspeakers. (See for example Herb Reichert's Gramophone Dreams #47.) At this show, however, Ampsandsound manufacturer/designer Justin Weber was showing his Arches monoblocks ($50,000/pair), which put out up to 65W each with KT-88 tubes or 85W each with KT-150 tubes.

The Hear This room included products from Von Schweikert Audio, WestminsterLab, Lampizator, Small Green Computer, Sonore, and MasterBuilt.

Can you judge an exhibitor's products by the music he plays? Perhaps not, but when I walk into a room playing "Hotel California," that mad percussion ditty "Music for Bang, Baa-Room and Harp," 90s grunge (footnote 1), or God No! Jazz at the Pawnshop, it's all I can do to stay put and not scream.

A dependable first stop for any show attendee, Jeffrey Catalano’s High Water Sound room got down to business and quick. Offering a similar system to last year's but with new Cessaro Horn Acoustics’ Wagner II Horn Speakers ($65,000/pair), the system had considerable jump and force paired to a liquid midrange and absolutely clean, nearly medicinal, certainly soul-enriching highs.

I have yet to hear a pair of Joseph Audio speakers I didn't marvel at. That includes the small-in-size but huge-of-sound Pulsar2 Graphene standmounts ($9999/pair) in a room commanded by Rogue Audio. I left the room saying "Crazy! Crazy" to Rogue’s Nick Fitzsimmons and Bill Magerman, but before then I sat in dumbstruck silence.