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Everyone's favorite audio show is about to get underway. The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest returns to the Denver Marriott Tech Center on October 11–13.

RMAF may not be the biggest consumer audio show in North America—that honor recently passed to T.H.E. Show Newport Beach—but even without a cigar show, car show, wine show, and airport right across the street, RMAF's 440 brands spread over 138 hotel rooms, 25 big rooms (and three more at the Hyatt across the street), a CANJAM headphone ballroom hosting a record 37 exhibitors, 14 software vendors (CDs, LPs, etc.), and 26 lobby exhibits is definitely something to get excited about.

The 14th Annual Blues Masters at the Crossroads will be held on October 21st and 22nd at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kansas.

The sixth annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is about to get underway at the end of this week. Scheduled to take place October 2–4, at the Denver Marriott Tech Center, the largest high-end audio show in the US that's open to the public will offer 150 exhibit rooms packed with products from 479 companies. Despite the economic slowdown, at least 3500 audiophiles, the same number as last year, are expected to attend.

Back in Atlanta's World Congress Center for the second year it is hot (around 90°F) and humid outside but it is cool at the 2010 CEDIA Exposition. On the very first full day, I found a slew of interesting new loudspeakers and that's despite having seen less than a third of the Show floor. Undoubtedly more will be discovered but it is great to say that all of the most intriguing new ones are relatively inexpensive.

I start my second report from the 2010 CEDIA Exposition by returning to MartinLogan. As well as their $2000/pair ElectroMotion electrostatic hybrid that I described in my first report from CEDIA, the Kansas company showed the appealing new 2-way Theos. This hand-built floorstander combines a 9.2"-wide by 44"-tall XStat electrostatic transducer with a 8" aluminum-cone woofer in a bass reflex enclosure. Its large electrostatic radiator and passive woofer can be bi-wired or not with a unique tool-less binding-post design. At $5000/pair, the Theos will be the most affordable speaker in the Reserve Series of floorstanders.

Looking back at the 2010 CEDIA Exposition, I was struck by a couple of new products which, I hope, presage a rethinking of modern electronics design. Today, the streaming of program content can be accomplished by TVs, by Blu-ray players, by dedicated servers and, for all I know, someone will put that capability into a speaker system. The result is that, unless one chooses very carefully, one will be buying the same technology redundantly. By contrast, high-end companies have striven to separate their dedicated analog/stereo products from their digital/multichannel products, forcing the very picky among us into a kludgy home-theater-bypass. Again, we end up buying more boxes and interconnections than should be necessary.

This year's three-day Capital Audio Fest (CAF) opens on August 28 in Rockville, MD, relatively close to the nation's capitol. In a new, unquestionably friendlier and eminently accessible location, the Hilton Rockville, the show promises, at press time, up to 39 active exhibit rooms, probably more than the 118 "officially listed" brands and exhibitors, and a potential 300+ products.

With 147 exhibitor rooms, 60 active CanJam exhibitor booths, 40 lobby exhibitor spaces, and 380 exhibitor companies from 23 countries, Denver's annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest ranks as the second-largest consumer audio show in North America. The three-day show opens to the public on Friday, October 2 at noon in its familiar Denver Marriott Tech Center location.

Poland's Audio Video Show, held in Warsaw each November and now firmly established as Europe's No.2 hi-fi event, has a very different feel from Event No.1: High End, held each May in Munich, Germany. Unlike High End's business-to-business approach, the Audio Video Show is very much for regular consumers, of whom more than 14,000 attended over the show's three days, November 17–19. Boosted by a modest "Smart Home" presence, that was an increase of nearly 18% over last year's show, alongside more modest growth in the numbers of exhibitors and exhibit rooms.

As you can see from the logo above, Stereophile has accepted an invitation to be inducted into the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA), as the exclusive US member of the EISA's Hi-Fi Expert Group. EISA's invitation came too late for Stereophile to take part in the 2017 awards, but we will be a full participant in 2018. Meanwhile, here are the 2017–2018 winners.