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After a few hours of listening to speakers that cost well into the five and six figures, how much enthusiasm could I muster for a pair that retails for just $995? As it turns out, a lot.
I'd heard the $750/pair Magnepan LRS a few years ago and marveled at how low the admission price to true high-end sonics can be. They sounded fast, surefooted, and transparent. Magnepan's new LRS+ speakers offer more of the same but at an elevated level and a slightly elevated price. Wendell Diller, a.k.a. Mr. Magnepan, calls them "higher-resolution" speakers.
Upscale Distribution's Kevin Deal brought his posse to AXPONA (left–right: Randy Bingham, Kevin Deal, Craig Hoffman, Alex Brinkman). Though Deal's room was static, he also sponsored legacy French brand, Cabasse, in an adjacent room, where Cabasse representative Jean-Michel Polit demoed the thrilling flagship Pearl Pelegrina loudspeakers ($20,999/pair).
First up, Deal spoke about the new, Italian-made, class-A, Pathos Acoustics Inpol2 Hybrid integrated amplifier ($10,595), saying "It's beyond Italian; they have their own woodshop and paint shop, machine their own remotes, and the…
The AXPONA experience is head-spinning in more ways than one. So many rooms, so many people to meet, so much gear to listen to. And so much regret when you realize that you can't fit it all into two or three days, unless each day were to last as long as it does it on Mercury. (Maybe one day we'll have audio shows there—sign me up!)
Another head-spinner occurred Saturday morning when I had to almost forcibly drag myself off the listening couch in the 16th-floor Avantgarde Acoustic room, where dCS front-end gear and a pair of gargantuan Trio G3 horn speakers ($180,000) had bowled me over…
Bill Duddleston brought not one, but four of his Legacy Audio systems to Axpona, where he mixed and matched components, but each system was largely unique, especially in the loudspeaker complement.
In System D, the new Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/processor/correction unit ($7950), Legacy PowerBloc2 monoblocks ($2145 apiece) rated at 325Wpc into 8 ohms, 650Wpc into 4 ohms, and Legacy Studio HD standmount monitors in Cabernet High Gloss ($2695/pair).
System C consisted of the Legacy Wavelet II all-in-one, Legacy Amp I*V 2 (610Wpc into 8 ohms, 1kWpc at 4 ohms) with ICEdge…
Elton John fans, forgive me. I've nothing against the man, but most of his songs do less for me than a nude painting does for a blind man (that is, we literally can't see the attraction). So it was fairly remarkable that, in the Focal demo room, the Dolby Atmos version of Elton John's "Rocket Man" made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. If a high-end rig can put you in touch with music you normally don't even care about, it's time to investigate.
I surveyed the speakers in the room: six Focal floorstanders (four with tops that incorporate an upfiring midrange driver), a center…
Trends come and go. Manufacturers lose their shirts and pull up stake. This year's hot design trend becomes tomorrow's price knockdown. Amid the hype and ballyhoo often found in high end audio, Audio Note (UK) remains an oasis of beauty, purity, and simplicity, and at affordable prices. A legacy brand that doesn't feel the need to change designs, when, after all they make music, Audio Note (UK) offered lucidity and great music at AXPONA.
The Audio Note (UK) system assembled by Mike Kay of Libertyville, Illinois' Audio Archon and Audio Note's Adrian Ford-Crush costs a total of $28,133,…
When a brand that's rightly famous for world-class electrostatic panels wants to design a line of in-wall speakers, things can get pretty daunting. After all, electrostats are dipoles—sound flows from both the front and back. Installing a dipole in a wall is as useless as hanging a stained-glass window in a dark closet.
All the same, MartinLogan says it used its floorstanding hybrid electrostatic loudspeakers as the performance benchmark for its in-walls. That ultimately yielded the 7'-tall Statement 40XWs ($45,000/pair, above). The speakers are mounted in a sealed, acoustically…
A consistent player both at shows and in the hi-fi world, Linear Tube Audio's Nicholas Tolson brought smart, sparse rigs to two AXPONA rooms that played great music.
One rig (Room 606) consisted of a Linear Tube Audio MicroZOTL preamplifier (Level 2) ($5750) and ZOTL Ultralinear+ power amplifier ($6800), a LampizaOr Baltic 3 DAC ($6600), and DeVore Fidelity Super Nine loudspeakers ($9990/pair), with cabling by Cardas. Tolson streamed tracks from Roon on an Intel NUC via a Sonore UltraRendu.
As a former owner of The Nines, this system hit all my pleasure points. I was never an…
In search of beauty and excitement, I struck a lode on the fifth floor, where a pair of just-introduced, double-ported, full-range Revel 328Be speakers ($17,600) played in tandem with a spiffy Mark Levinson front end: the No 5101 streaming SACD player/DAC ($5500), the 5206 preamp ($9000), and the 5302 power amp (also $9000).
The speakers' six 8" woofers, three on each side, performed with great tautness and speed, no overhang. On the other end of the frequency range, the beryllium-dome tweeters (hence the Be in the Revels' model name) carried musical overtones and harmonics with airy, no-…
The Germans have a great word to describe things that are insipid and inoffensive: salonfähig ("fit for the parlor"). On that note: How many Patricia Barber tracks can a man take? After two days at AXPONA, I craved some kickass rock 'n' roll. Green Day, Rammstein, Rage Against the Machine; the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin would do in a pinch. And fortunately, that's the scene I found in the JBL room. Unapologetic raucous rock emanated from the new 13"-tall JBL L52 bookshelf speakers ($995/pair), powered by a JBL SA750 Class-G streaming integrated amplifier ($3000).
The monitors…