Ray Chelstowski, Jason Victor Serinus

Jimi Hendrix: Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision; Wilderado: Talker; Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad.

From May 4 through August 18, 2024, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (SFMOMA) staged the largest multisensory installation cum performance art exhibition in its history. Entitled Art Of Noise, the multi-room show, which occupied 14,000ft² on the museum's seventh floor, drew an estimated 140,000 visitors, boosting museum attendance by over 33% from the same period in 2023. Even accounting for postpandemic attendance declines, that's an impressive figure.

The exhibit, designed to celebrate "pioneering designs shaping our music experiences," was the creation of two visionaries: Museum Curator Joseph Becker, 40, and New York–based audio salon host/entrepreneur/system and fashion designer Devon Turnbull, aka Ojas, 45.

No fewer than eight boxes, powered by six after-market power cables, comprise my current reference front-end. As much as separate boxes can afford superior isolation and provide far more room for visionary engineers to work their magic, the advantages of a single box, which requires a single power cable and far fewer after-market interconnects, are obvious.

Enter Simaudio's Moon 891 network player/preamplifier ($25,000; footnote 2). Also called a "streaming preamplifier,"it includes a DAC that converts PCM and MQA files up to 32/384 (with 24-bit files upconverted to 32-bit) and DSD files up to 256. It also includes what Simaudio company co-owner Costa Koulisakis describes as "a fully configurable" MC/MM phono stage. Both theoretically and practically, it's an ideal solution for someone with space and/or budget constraints.

It is unusual to begin a review with a detailed discussion of setup. But setup protocol for the Moon 861 power amplifier ($22,000 each), the top-level amplifier in the North Collection from Moon, which I reviewed bridged in mono, proved crucial to its sound.

The setup saga began when Moon co-owner Costa Koulisakis traveled to Port Townsend from Quebec to help remove two 861 amplifiers from their sturdy flight cases and set them up.

Sisound of Poland's Product Manager Rafal Wofczyński presented the world premiere of his 3-way Sisound Solidus S loudspeaker. The speaker, which is currently available only in Poland, claims a frequency response of 26Hz-20kHz, a 4-ohm nominal impedance that dips to 2.5 ohms or lower in the extended LF setting, and 90dB sensitivity.

A chance after-dinner encounter with Jacek Grodecki, owner of Warsaw-based Closer Acoustics, impelled me to visit their room. So did my memories of the positive listening experience I had with Closer Acoustics in 2023.

Perhaps my biggest discovery at the 2023 Warsaw Audio Video Show was Fezz Audio's reasonably priced line of excellent-sounding electronics.