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Folks, if you're traveling to Chicago to attend the 2019 Audio Expo North America (AXPONA), you've got to have the AXPONA app. It's free, and you can download it from a link on the AXPONA website. Last year, American audio shows felled more than ten million 100'-tall trees—just for their ink-on-paper floor plans. They had to reopen two nuclear power plants just to keep the elevators running in Las Vegas. The Chicago River backed up like a toilet—clogged by discarded show guides. This year, all you need is a smart phone, the AXPONA app—and the stamina to visit almost two hundred rooms filled…
In the middle of AXPONA's annual pre-show industry reception, held Thursday evening in the huge Schaumburg Ballroom of the Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center, Paul Miller (on the right in the photo above), Director of AVTech Media/AVTech Media Americas—which publishes Stereophile, AudioStream, InnerFidelity, AnalogPlanet, Sound & Vision, and the UK's Hi-Fi News & Record Review (amongst other properties)—unexpectedly took to the stage. With the assistance of Show Organizer Liz Miller, Paul honored Stereophile's former Editor-in-Chief, John Atkinson (now Technical Editor). Yours…
The show was scheduled to open at 10am today (April 12), but at 9:55am there was already a line of people at the registration desk. AXPONA looks on track to replace CES as the premier audio show in North America.
One of my first stops this morning—the first morning of AXPONA 2019—was the Shunyata room in the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel. Shunyata, as you're probably aware, has long been one of the more scientific-minded of the companies focused on quality power for home audio systems.
I learned today that Shunyata has an expanding presence in the medical industry; It's actually a sister company, Clear Image Scientific. One graph displayed in the Shunyata room showed a huge reduction in noise in what appeared to be an EKG; see the image below. (Apologies for the poor image quality.) Look at the…
Illinois dealer F1 chose the sonically challenged, glass-encased Nirvana Lounge, on the second floor of the Renaissance Schaumberg's Convention Center, to stage its $428,871 crate-décor system complete with an important premiere: the Dan D'Agostino Momentum HD preamplifier. Alas, the hard sound and moderately booming bass, whether on a recording of Bach's Suite No.1 for unaccompanied cello or some driving fusion, made for a less than auspicious start to the show—but surely no one could have made a good sound in that space. On top of that, as I soon discovered, many visitors to these huge…
Happily, extremely listenable and well-balanced sound from a 24/176.4 file of Brubeck's "Take Five," and a 16-bit file of a track that I think was titled "Camptino," from the Erik Truffaz Quartet featuring the wonder Rokia Traoré, was the hallmark of a large, air-walled space sponsored by multiple companies. Here, chatting was minimal, perhaps simply because the sound was so good. I really enjoyed how mellow the sax sounded, and how drums were rendered with truthfulness without becoming clattery.
Part of the responsibility for the space's success falls at the feet of the new Swiss-made…
I am not a bot. I measure my own DIY audio gear. But as an audio-show reporter, I'm only interested in those biologically significant sounds that connect my mind as directly as possible to the music being played. I want to see and feel some inkling of a real orchestra floating between the speakers. I found that connection right away in the room sponsored by retailer-distributor Refined Audio.
In addition to fine music reproduction, I had the honor of discussing the sensory perceptions of bats and bullfrogs with my new friend and hero, Steven Dear (above), who is a professor of…
The room presented by importer Vana LTD of Lake Grove, New York, featured (in addition to some record cleaning fluid and Okki Nokki record-cleaning machines) analog components by the European Audio Team (EAT) and loudspeakers by Audio Physik.
Lovers of antique high-end automobiles in particular appreciate the aesthetic of the 200+lb Forté turntable, all gleaming chrome, mirror black, and leather. The table with the polished F-Note tonearm installed retails for $11,495, but looked like it cost considerably more; the photo above fails to capture the sheer scale of the thing. You can add…
The late Arnie Nudell, co-founder of Infinity, was very much a mentor to PS Audio's Paul McGowan, and Paul and his team have been working a loudspeaker design that would honor Nudell. AXPONA saw the first public demo of the new speaker, the AN3, which is expected to be available toward the end of the year at a price somewhere in the region of $11,500–$14,500/pair. The AN3 features a servo-corrected 12" aluminum-cone woofer, driven by a 700W amplifier mounted on one of the sides, with a folded ribbon tweeter, a rectangular planar midrange unit sourced from Bohlender-Graebener, and an 8" cone "…
AXPONA's Master Class lectures offer a series of seminars on sometimes controversial subjects. To wrap up Friday afternoon's talks, Channel D's Rob Robinson explained why for phono preamplifiers, current-mode amplification, with its zero-ohm input impedance, gets the best signal/noise ratio from moving-coil cartridges, compared with conventional voltage-mode circuits, and even improves tracking performance. Michael Fremer reviews Rob's new Lino C 2.0 current-mode phono preamplifier in the June 2019 issue of Stereophile.