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At AXPONA 2025, Jonathan Halpern of Tone Imports and Matt Rotunda of Pitch Perfect Audio teamed up in room 2025. Very au courant. I first met Halpern and speaker designer John DeVore years ago, when both worked at Steve Mishoe’s In Living Stereo, a high-end store in New York. Their careers have long intersected—and so has their gear.

The duo’s analog front end featured a MusiKraft moving-coil cartridge—misread by my editor as “Muskrat”; happily, its performance was anything but furry. The cart ($2950–$3650) was mounted to the tonearm of a JC Verdier La Platine magnetic-bearing…

Treehaus: The name conjures bark and birdsong, but its products are pure Klangbildvergrößerungsmaschinen*. Rich Pinto of Treehaus Audiolab creates gear that fuses sonic beauty with sculptural woodwork and the control of a practiced hand. All circuitry and internal construction are the work of Radu Tarta, a designer known for his meticulous builds.

Making its world debut at AXPONA, the Treehaus LCR phono preamplifier ($24,000) pairs a tube-rectified outboard power supply with Finemet inductors in LCR configuration and 7308/12AT7 gain stages.

The analog front end includes an…

There's nothing like a new turntable to set my pulse racing. So when I first saw the thread-drive, magnetic-bearing Yukiseimitsu Audio AP-01 ($31,975) at last year's AXPONA, my jaw dropped, my scalp tingled, and my ears pricked up. It's back this year in its new EM edition—still sleek, still strange.

TJ Goldsby, vice president of sales and dealer relations at Axiss Distribution Inc., brought a rig so striking I nearly tripped over myself trying to get closer.

The system included the Yukiseimitsu Audio AP-01EM turntable, paired with the world-premiere AP-01…

The system in the Rogue room included an Eversolo DMP-A6 streamer ($859), a Benchmark…

Charlotte de Witte's Sanctum, my current techno obsession, was already spinning when I stepped into the Audio Note UK room. Sales executive Adrian Ford-Crush stood nearby; across the room, founder Peter Qvortrup—the company's resident iconoclast—paged through Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, a scathing look at the environmental and ethical costs of artificial intelligence. But then the music took over, as it always does in this room.

Ford-Crush and Qvortrup played vinyl and CDs through an all-Audio Note system. It included a CDT Four CD transport ($21,119), a prototype DAC 5.…

Magico didn’t provide prices for most products, but the company’s Peter Mackay (pictured) estimated the system's cost at over $2 million. Center stage stood the 1000lb Magico M9s ($750,000/pair), powered by D’Agostino Relentless 800 monoblocks ($195,000/pair) for the woofers and Relentless Epic 1600 monoblocks ($349,500/pair) for the mids and highs. The scale of…

Though similar in many respects, with a very similar appearance, these two products—the ZENith Next-Gen and…

I have several terabytes of music stored on a Synology NAS. Connecting to my NAS proved trivial—simpler than with Roon. With Roon, you have to get the path exactly right, and every time I enter it, I find I've forgotten how. Sense guides you through the process, helping to locate your NAS. It works.

You can use the ZENith Next-Gen as a standalone device with the Sense app managing your library and playing your music. Or the ZENith can serve as an endpoint—which is to say, as a streamer controlled by another device; you could then use a separate Roon server, for example, while…

It has long been apparent that for some music consumers—those who lack at least modest proficiency with computers—maintaining a digital music library can be a daunting chore. If your library consists only of paid commercial downloads, you may not have a problem, because usually paid downloads have their metadata well-sorted: They should work fine in any system, with tracks collected together in an album and album art displayed. (If they don't, complain to the download service, though they'll probably blame it on the record label.)

But if,…