Who is excited about Capital Audiofest 2023?

I went today...

• Caladans: wasn’t my music choice, sounded a bit thin lacked lower end gravitas.. but nice and tight, fast, and great tone in the mids and decent highs. a lot of speaker for the price
• Easiest to listen to: NSMT (monitors+bandpass sub combo) smooth and true.
• 300B integrated that caught my eye: the Westinghouse 91E (it was driving the top full range driver only of an active sub tower) didn’t love the bass/midbass integration - which wasn't powered by the Westinghouse, rather the active speaker itself. I would have liked to have seen them driving a speaker full range alone, 25 watts per channel after all. A 5 year warranty on 300B tubes (!)
• Worst sound: didn’t note the brand, a larger 3rd floor mini ball room was open baffle 7’ tall ribbon/planar + bass modules (4 towers total) maybe too far away from the back wall but sounded very thin and hotel california was painfully edgy.
• The horns in the Viva room had a surprisingly (albeit narry) honky tone in the upper bass/lower mid that was distracting
• MBL - first time in person, impressive
• My favorite of the day: Consonos, their midbass (open baffle) and sealed sub blended beautifully. it’s a 4 way with the 3 higher freq drivers being open baffle and highest 2 are planar drivers. The source was a Mytek Empire and their in-house amps were hidden (their faceplates didn’t make it to the show so they put them behind a curtain). Supposedly each driver is actively driven by it’s own 400w amp, so 8 amp channels in total. I think the speakers are $17k and the speakers + amps are $70k, so with the Mytek it’s < $100k. Trounced some other $200-300k combos. (I was in the room at a less busy time and he played several requests of songs I know well, I went straight home and compared - damn... damn.... damn...)
• several separate beautiful recordplayer setups played dirty records, annoying pops and such during playback...
• Oh the bacch-sp was cool not too exaggerated to be fake, he also took requests. I am eager to get my setup, was able to talk to the founder/professor - said they’d be shipping my kit next week so will report back on how it works in a new thread.

Did the mbl setup manage to standout this time around?

I was there Friday. Was planning to go back yesterday or today but didn’t make it so I really didn’t get to listen to as much as I had hoped. The ampsandsound room was the best that I heard.  It was their most expensive Arch mono block amps in action and the first time I’ve listened to their equipment. Very impressive. Also listened to their headphone amp at the Audeze both and was also very impressed. It will probably be my next amp. The QLN reference speakers were very impressive too with the Vinnie Rossi electronics. I always like listening to Classic Audio speakers with the Atma-Sphere electronics. No Class D’s though. And I agree, the Songer field coils were nice too. Deja Vu’s big horns sounded very good and the monitors (sorry the name escapes me) for the asking price of around $7k - $8k were impressive. Last time I attended CAF was 2018 and I must say the equipment that I was able to listen to this time for the most part was impressive and in general the rooms seemed much better than before.

Last time I attended CAF was 2018 and I must say the equipment that I was able to listen to this time for the most part was impressive and in general the rooms seemed much better than before.

I agree with this statement 100%. I go to CAF every single year. And I don’t take oscilloscopes or decibel meters with me to the party unlike my manmap style friend. But yes, with few exceptions most rooms sounded pretty good. Some of them exceptionally good

Compared to previous years many rooms sounded good.

1) Schweikert in the large atrium room. The room, per the designer who ran the demo is the best room on the show circuit. Probably most setups would sound spectacular. The soundstage is like in an IMAX. 

2) Cessaro horns sounded good

3) Vivid/Mola sounded good

4) First time I heard the big Bayz audio speaker. Great, but 160k.

5) Gershman acoustics - great price/value

6) Joseph audio - always good, never heard a bad room from this company.

Bit dissapointing:

1) Borresson - I wanted to like the rooms and the lower X models, but fatigue set in after 1 song.

2) MBL 101 - Nice, but for 100k speakers something was missing in this setup. Too soft sounding.

3) Sunday was very low traffic. Not good for the companies exhibiting

Overall, great, wish I had more than 4 hours. One really needs 2 days.