Rogier van Bakel

One unusual thing in the large Legacy space at AXPONA was the placement of two pairs of beautiful-looking speakers: Legacy's V system and the Aeris. They stood in a straight line angled about 30° away from one of the long walls, albeit parallel to a curtain that the Legacy team had placed there. The grouping of equipment was also quite far over to the left of the room, instead of near the center of the wall.

Last summer, when I went shopping for a pair of standmount speakers for a bedroom, I settled on Monitor Audio Bronze 100s. They ticked the boxes: musical to a T, natural-sounding, not too incisive or fatiguing, and a pretty damn good value at around $700/pair. I dug 'em, and still do.

At AXPONA, the British company demonstrated what happened when it gave its designers license to develop a top-of-the-line floorstander. Fifty years of both incremental improvements and great leaps forward have culminated in the $13,900/pair Monitor Audio 200 3G.

Industry legend Paul Barton has been designing speakers for more than half a century. He's also quite the speaker himself.

I'd sauntered into the Lenbrook room to check out Barton's new PSB Synchrony T800 floorstanders (PSB is a Lenbrook brand). My visit was serendipitously timed. Not only was the man himself present; he and I, along with the gregarious Joe Corona of Chicago retailer Saturday Audio Exchange, were the only ones left when the doors closed at 6pm. We settled in. Corona provided slices of coffee cake, and Barton supplied wisdom and bon mots.

If you're like me and the topic turns to active speakers, you'll probably think of affordable products. Maybe the mighty $649 Vanatoo Transparent One Encore comes to mind, or the sub-$1000 powerhouse that is a pair of SVS Prime Pro wireless speakers. The KEF LS50W is a strong contender even at $2800, and if your budget allows, you might consider Buchardt A5s ($3900/pair).

Two months ago, at the audio expo in Tampa, I stumbled upon a pair of most intriguing French speakers. The $8000/pair Diptyque 107 is a medium-sized planar magnetic whose designers, Gilles Douziech and Eric Poix, make no secret of their love for Magnepan. All the same, the duo has sought to improve on that company's famed panel technology, mostly by addressing a perennial shortcoming of such dipoles: their lack of deep bass.

I wasn't necessarily expecting to find Alon Wolf (right) striking dangling bars of aluminum with a small mallet. Had Magico's celebrated designer embarked on a second career as a percussionist? Nah. He was demonstrating to Stereophile Editor Jim Austin (left) and myself that aluminum, which Magico has long used as the ideal material for its enclosures, rings, but can also be very effectively dampened by sandwiching a proprietary elastomer between two layers of it. The first (untreated) bar rang like a bell. The second one had a padded adhesive backing that took away about 80% of the effect. The last bar was the aforementioned sandwich, and yup: dead. No ringing.

As audiophiles, we strive almost obsessively for a low noise floor and no distractions, only to be spectacularly thwarted when we evaluate equipment in a retail or show environment. Around us, people are entering and exiting, and often talking up a storm. The air conditioner is set to a low drone. Bass notes leak in from the next room over. AXPONA's cavernous Ear Gear space, where more than two dozen manufacturers of headphones and related equipment were demonstrating their wares, was awash with buzzing, excited people—the best kind of noise, really, even if you have to turn the demo cans way up to block it.

I had come to pay RAAL-requisite a visit, hoping to audition a first for me: a recently-launched ribbon headphone called the CA-1a.