I went to Axpona for the first time this year with my good buddy Mike. We had a good time and went to every room. That’s right, every last one!
It became easier and easier as we went room-to-room to immediately make an assessment of setups that sounded good and sounded bad. There were some amazing systems all around, some amazingly good systems done on a budget that were very impressive, and more than one cost-no-object setup that was less than impressive. Occasionally a room was slighted by a less than stellar recording, but sticking around for a second song would tell you if the recording was to blame or the room and setup generally was lacking.
In no particular order, here were my detailed impressions:
The best-of-the-best was the Sonus Faber paired with Audio Research ARC Ref. 750SEs tube monoblocks. I swear to you it sounded like Louis Armstrong was on a stage in front of me playing live. Later on we returned to hear Beyonce’s "Partition" playing; it was a modern song (loudness wars destruction; garbage in, garbage out) but still quite impressive.
A close second was a big Wilson Audio room. Wilsons - when set up correctly - never cease to sound great. In fact several of the rooms who were promoting other gear (tables, cables, etc. and not speakers) chose to use Wilsons as their speakers. There is a solid reason for that.
My third favorite - in all honesty - were the three rooms featuring GoldenEar Triton References. They are indeed amazing speakers and a tremendous value. I heard them in the GoldenEar room, a PS Audio big room, and one vendor (Saturday Audio Exchange) also had them in use. They sounded great in all three rooms. I am a bit biased and I own Triton Ones; my impression is that the Refs are like my T1’s except more refined. A bit more clear, a bit better bass, and a bit taller and wider. The PS Audio room with the T-Refs sounded very, very good. Easily top three for me.
Fourth place was a room featuring some big Martin-Logan electrostats. They sounded amazing. I have always loved ML’s...and once again they did not disappoint. I will own a pair at some point in the future along with my Tritons (or maybe I’ll upgrade to T-Refs) and of course I’ll always keep the Mirage M1-Si’s I recently acquired (I also have two pairs of M3-si’s and a pair of M5-si’s...I love Mirage bipolars and the way they disappear). I should have asked Sandy Gross if he will ever make a GoldenEar bipolar speaker lineup...maybe I’ll e-mail him.
Continuing on...I had a few "must hear" rooms on my list; MBL’s were one, and so were the Tekton and Magico rooms. Sadly, all were initially "meh" to me. The Tektons sounded "bright" and I did not care for them as much as many other speakers I heard. They did not have the new mega-tweeter Tektons that everyone is talking about on display or available for listening.
The Magico room itself was a total let-down; they did not bring any big, impressive super-high dollar monster speakers, and the smaller pair that they had did not do much for me; I preferred the sound of my GoldenEars as well as many other show speakers I heard. Later on, I heard a different room that just so happened to have some larger, more "magic" Magico’s playing, and that pair did indeed sound quite good, so the jury is still out for me on what they can actually sound like and whether they are worth all the hype. I would have to spend a lot of time listening to them and carefully weigh the value they represent before I could ever seriously consider them. I preferred several other brands better such as GoldenEar and Martin-Logan that to my ears sound better and are cheaper. Don't get me wrong, the bigger Magico's sounded good, but they didn't blow me away. I expected them to blow me away. With that said, I do get the hype and why people like them. They were very accurate and detailed.
Concerning the MBL’s: There were two rooms featuring MBL’s. The room with smaller MBL’s sounded very nice. Bass was a bit lacking, but the mids and highs and sense of open space and a nice deep sound-stage was very pleasant. The room with bigger, more expensive MBL’s ($75,000+) sounded awful. The bass in multiple songs had a very strange frequency / resonance issue. It may well have been the room interacting with the speakers, but the bottom line is that it did not sound pleasing to my ears. I had never heard MBL’s before, so I was very curious. Overall, I will consider them a strange curiosity and cannot say I would ever aspire to own a pair. Even the small ones that I liked were bested by other speakers I heard at less than half the price.
Other interesting rooms were Daedalus (amazing craftsmanship and the speakers sounded excellent!) - I could see owning a pair of those.
I also liked the Exogal speakers I heard. Very nice.
I had two big surprises where the (very good) quality of the sound seemed to not match what I saw in front of me. "Ryan" was the first pleasant surprise; these were $4,000 bookshelf speakers on stands that sounded absolutely amazing - they sounded like speakers costing much, much more. It was a very well done setup. The second surprise were the Elac monitors. I could not believe how great a set of small, sub-$600 speakers could sound.
In my "best bang for the buck" category you have to give props to Emotiva and Hsu research. Emo had a full home theater setup on the main floor and it sounded great! Of course it featured the un-available RMC-1 processor. Heck, I own an XMC-1 myself - and they still don’t have the Dolby Atmos board out for it despite talking about it for over a year. I don’t know if the HDCP2.2 HDMI board is out yet either. Emo makes great stuff, but they need to fix their marketing and production issues if they want to be a serious contender as they are angering many of their existing customers with continued delays and broken promises.
Dr. Hsu was in the Hsu room and he gave a great home theater demo. He pointed out the low cost (great value), great sound and amazing bass their products offer. If on a budget, Hsu is a great way to go for good sound. You simply can’t beat his subs for their performance at their price point.
Gayle Sanders had a new full digital setup (Eikon) being rolled out. It was a complete end-to-end setup (processor, amplification, speakers) for ~$25,000 retail. It sounded fine, but did not blow me away, and I much prefer his older Martin-Logan electrostatic designs, particularly at that price point. For that kind of $ I could pick a much better system from gear I heard at the show. Kind of like the Magico's, they did everything well, but did not impress me overall.
There was a room with lots of snake oil / cable nonsense set up, from carbon fiber outlet covers to cables with all sorts of cable magnet witchcraft and some guy with a dry erase board talking about how they shift the space-time continuum and make your stuff sound better.
Lastly, I saw many amazingly expensive turntables, but few were in use - and digital sadly ruled the show, with lots of TIDAL/MQA streaming setups in use. I did hear a nice Triangle Art setup.
In the main expo, I picked up a SWEET 6 record Stevie Ray Vaughan 45 RPM limited edition remaster setup from Acoustic sounds. I talked to Chad Kassem himself about it before I pulled the trigger. It wasn’t cheap at four bills, but I love SRV - so it will be worth every penny.
My only gripe was a lack of restrooms on each floor (you had to go down to the main floor or sneak into a demo-rooms bathroom) and a lack of listening etiquette with some attendees (if you are in a stereo listening room and folks are waiting in a line for the center seats to open up to give a proper stereo listen, be it in the front, middle or back center), it is not polite (in my opinion) to go sit in the front row in a left or right (off center-line) seat where your head and body block the direct path from either the left or right speakers to the center listeners! Perhaps they thought they were being polite by not taking a coveted center-seat, but it screwed up more than one room where I was trying to get a good listen to the equipment. Many of the vendors were talking too much in their rooms as well. I think they should just let people listen, or take the side conversations into the hallway.
I can’t say I’d go every year as a consumer, but I am glad I did this time, and I had a blast with my buddy Mike. It proved to me what I’ve always known - that my two ears and the squishy gray matter between them are the best way to judge equipment and speakers. It did also confirm that a lot of the stuff that gets consistently hyped (Wilson, GoldenEar, Sonus Faber, Emotiva, ARC, Martin-Logan, Magico) gets hyped for a reason...it is because it sounds good to a lot of people!
