I typically write up a few show reports each year but for our site here, I tend to keep it on the lighter side as many of the brands, names, etc. are not familiar to many who frequent here.I decided this year to keep a shorter schedule than in the past. Last year, I was only there for 24 hours, with one overnight. This year, I arrived at the show around 3:00pm Friday, and departed at 1:30pm Sunday. For a change, the weather was perfect--60s and 70s, and clear. Weather for an indoor event? Sure, as you never know where you'll find a parking spot, and walking a quarter mile in 40 degree temperatures with rain is not pleasant; don't ask me how I learned this.
The Renaissance Hotel and Conference Center in Schaumburg (pictured at right) has been the home of the show for the past several years, and the show has grown to hundreds of rooms. The Renaissance is 16 stories tall, and there are demo rooms on most of the floors. The rooms on the first and second floors are typically meeting rooms or ballrooms, but the bulk of the demo rooms and suites are staggered about every other room on all floors but the 8th, 9th, and 10th.
I only mention this since the show is tiring! When the hotel has only six elevators, with two of them acting erratic and a third an alleged "express" elevator to the top floors (which I probably saw in operation only once over the past two shows), that leaves only the stairways. So as you can guess, most of my hopping between floors took me up and down the stairs.
The stairs were great for the cardio! But as the old saying goes, the dawgs were hurtin' by the end of Saturday!
One of the biggest draws of the show is the marketplace in the Exhibit Hall, and this year's selection of vinyl had grown. The usual audiophile music outlets were there, like Acoustic Sounds, Elusive Disc, Direct Audio and of course, Music Direct (who is local to AXPONA). Smaller independent record stores filled a few more booths, among them Picture Sleeve 45s from Plano, TX (who were selling LPs, of course), Johnny G. Collectibles, and Gus Fugazi Records. I came away relatively unscathed--I finally got both of Kevin Gray's Cohearant Records LPs, the 45 RPM War's Greatest Hits, and a couple of used records from Picture Sleeve 45s (below).
As usual, I stopped at Butcher Block Acoustics. What caught my eye is that the 3-shelf rack looked taller than I remembered it...or I got shorter. Turns out my height is just fine--they now offer a RigidRack Plus version of the rack which adds more space between the shelves. Doing some quick calculations in my head, the 3-shelf, 42-inch wide rack would probably work out perfectly for me. While they don't make racks to custom sizes, what they offer now are the same standard shelf sizes, but have sets of regular- and plus-sized legs for the racks. All of the shelving is maple (lighter color) and walnut (darker), and can be ordered in combination (maple shelves and walnut legs are the most popular option).
They're not inexpensive but, to put it into perspective, we ordered in four Amish-built tables for the living room a couple of years ago, and the cost of those has risen about 40%. And BBA's prices really aren't too much higher than they were a year or two ago. It costs a few pennies for good workmanship these days.
First, if anyone has looked into car audio at all, they would be familiar with the speaker manufacturer Morel. They have sold their drivers at places like Madisound Speaker Components for DIYers, and they've had a few lines of car speakers (two sets of which are in my daily driver). At this year's show, they're reintroducing their brand into home audio, and the speakers I heard redeemed themselves quite nicely. They were demoing the towers (far left, $2,000/pair), but the smaller bookshelf speakers with similar drivers seemed promising as well ($1200/pair, plus $300/pair for the matching stands).
In Yamaha's suite, I got to hear a new pair of their bookshelf speakers, along with an AM/FM receiver with high-resolution streaming. The receiver uses a high-quality ESS SABRE DAC, and also offers a phono (vinyl) input. While I heard the model from the top of the line, the entry-level R-N600A offers the same features at a $900 price point.
The second half of the Yamaha suite offered a timeline of their audio products. This was one of their first home audio products--the Yamaha HiFi Player, manufactured in 1954.
There were a few interesting sightings this year. Klipsch was giving a demo of their Cornwall IV loudspeakers, part of their Heritage Series. I'm not one for horn-loaded speakers (only the 15-inch woofer is direct-radiating in the Cornwalls), but these sounded better than I remember, based on earlier Cornwalls I've heard. But what really impressed me was the very deep bass. The Cornwalls don't have response all that low, but they had a beefy subwoofer on the room (pictured to the right, below). The small tube amp, driven by one 845 output tube per channel, offers up only 23 watts but, with the Cornwalls being highly efficient, one watt of power would probably drive these to near-deafening levels--about 102dB. (That is one advantage of horn speakers--they take very little power to drive.)
AvantGarde Acoustic also offered up horns in their suite, and they were one of the most neutral horn systems I have heard.
Using conventional drivers, these interesting-looking speakers from Vivid Audio sounded quite good as well.
If you're at all familiar with modern phono cartridges, most of the lower-cost varieties are a moving magnet design, and some (like Grado and Nagaoka) are moving iron. Moving coils are offered at a higher price point. But one intriguing type of phono cartridge, developed decades ago and modernized/perfected by DS Audio, is an optical cartridge. It creates sound using LEDs, light sensors, and a tiny mirror attached to the stylus, with that signal sent down to a proprietary phono amplifier (the silver component to the left, below). This is their entry-level, spotted here on a Clearaudio Concept turntable. Yes, that's a thin LED light on the front.
Got wood? Here's oen from Treehaus Audiolab.
And in the uber-ridiculous category, here's a system from Auralic...with a total system cost (including the wall of components) somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 million. Interestingly, many showgoers (including myself) did not think it sounded all that good. In my case, all I heard was "loud." So loud I didn't even bother staying in the room more than 30 seconds. But anyway...
Aside from seeing friends and some industry acquaintances, one highlight was attending the media-only presentation (hosted by speaker manufacturer Linkwitz) given by Kevin Gray. You know, the mastering engineer who never sleeps! I got to chat with him for a moment prior to the presentation. He told us the story behind his new Cohearant Records label, and how it took him 15 years to assemble an all-tube recording chain from the microphones to the cutting head. He also played one track each from both of his releases (Kirsten Edkins' Shapes & Sound, and Anthony Wilson's Hackensack West). His "recording studio" is actually his living room--the dimensions turned out to be ideal for recording small group jazz, just as Rudy Van Gelder had done it in the earliest days of recording albums for Blue Note Records in his living room (in Hackensack, New Jersey...which inspired the nickname for Kevin's studio and Wilson's album).
As for Linkwitz, they alaternated between two systems in the suite. Their design uses an open baffle for the drivers on top (meaning, no enclosure behind them), and the bass unit sits below.
One of the turntables in their suite was this model from Tri-Art Audio.
There was obviously a lot more than I could cover here in this brief show report, as AXPONA had hundreds of rooms to visit this year. Even with three days, it's difficult to see a lot of rooms, and even the veterans in the media are in a crush to get to the rooms if they are not among a staff of reviewers who can divide and conquer the exhibits. Still, catching up with everyone, and experiencing all of the equipment, is a yearly highlight for many of us. And I'm hoping next year that I can fine tune my visit to fit more in. And oddly...I'm already missing the cardio workout!
Parting shot...in the stairwell between the 2nd and 3rd floors.
Why do I want to enter this door, and why would I need a hard hat??
Why do I want to enter this door, and why would I need a hard hat??
