It always goes back to it's all about the room, regardless of the price of the equipment.
Short of trying equipment in your own listening room, a lot of time will be wasted in evaluating equipment in other rooms, regardless of the audio show.
Tampa Audio Show 2025
I skipped last years show mainly because I didn’t like the hotel they were in before and the prior show wasn’t that good overall. This year there were some very very good sounding rooms with some very expensive equipment, $1M+ in price. There were quite a few very good rooms with very reasonably priced equipment too like the Orchard room and the multiple Borreson rooms.
‘But there were a lot of rooms with expensive equipment that sounded very bad. Some bad enough to leave in less than a minute, some we waited for a couple different songs to play to see if it was just the song. In all cases, it wasn’t the song causing the issue. In some of these rooms, the bass sounded terrible, overly rich sounding, distorted, some just over powering the room. Some of us thought a couple of speakers blew out their tweeters they sounded so bad. A couple of these bad sounding rooms had the darling speakers of the audio mags with prices north of $170k. I’m curious if the audio mags will call out these bad sounding rooms like they did a couple,e years ago at axpona, or give us the rooms sounded very good to not bash any manufacturer.