AXPONA 2019

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dcbingaman

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AXPONA 2019
« on: 16 Apr 2019, 12:16 am »
Well, audio friends, I attend my first big audio show in over 20 years in Schaumburg, IL.  It was a blast, except for getting out of Chicago on airplane in a snowstorm yesterday.  (They completely shut O'Hare down at 2:00 pm Sunday afternoon on Easter Week, and damn near had a riot.  The Chicago Police had to come in to simmer everyone down.  I escaped on the last plane to STL out of Midway (Thank God for Southwest Airlines) this morning at 12:30 am.)

The show itself was very interesting.  Lots of big, expensive, pretty stuff that costs as much as a good sports car.  The big kids had the big rooms in the Convention Center.  There were excellent set-ups auditioned by Vandersteen (outstanding sounding, as usual), B&W, Magico, Focal (cool-looking but disappointing sonics) and a few others.  There were two MCH audio / video set-ups by Emotiva and JTR Speakers / JVC that were also outstanding. They all sounded pretty good because they were all in rooms with 15' ceilings that were 30' wide by 40-45' deep.  It is relatively easy to get good bass response in this size room. 

The Magico speakers were quite impressive and could reproduce music at rock concert levels.  That sounded good in a large room, but when I heard a smaller pair in a regular size room, they sounded pretty much like everything else.  There is a lesson there.  If you have a 35' x 50' x 12' listening room, the Magico's might work quite well, but in 90% of consumer listening rooms, they are overkill at best and inappropriate at worst.  I have no doubt in my room, my pair of 30 year old Spendor SP-1's or any other good BBC monitor would sound as least as good as a pair of the Magico's, simply due to physics and the type of music I listen to.

The 100 other exhibitors had to make due with hotel rooms in the Renaissance 16 floor tower.  This is where all the problems occurred.  About 3 of these rooms sounded good, and all were distinguished by how they treated the room problem.  The PSB / NAD / Dirac Live room used room calibration and correction to clean up their room and it worked pretty well.  Pass had a second room with a set of full range single driver speakers, (Lowther's I think), that they drove with the FirstWatt SIT-3 and a Pass XA-25 that also sounded pretty good.  Finally, the best sound in the tower was a system set up, ASYMMETRICALLY, by the Dan Meinwald and the great Tim dePavarchini with all EAR-USA equipment and at set of Marten monitors.  Everything in this system sounded phenomenal to my ears.  Mr. dePavarchini was gracious but tired after a long couple days.

Every other room sounded OK, but honestly they were all pretty much the same - even the music.  The big guys used these funky jazz - blues vocal tracks with deep synthesized bass - it was interesting but ultimately boring.  The smaller rooms used similar music, but hardly any that I would use to judge fidelity to acoustic sources.  I would never listen to this shit in my system.  Very few played any well-recorded classical music.  (Vandersteen was playing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony which sounded wonderful).  The other distinguishing thing was, due to inattention to the room acoustics, nearly every room featured boomy overblown bass response.  Discussion with exhibitors on these problems showed me a LOT of ignorance on this whole topic.  I asked many of these guys if they had heard of Earl Geddes or Fred Tooles work of balancing room acoustics below 250 hz and got met with a lot of blank stares.  There are a lot of interesting, innovative ideas in high-end audio, but only about 10-15 real engineers who know what they are doing.....things haven't changed much in this regard in over 20 years.

There were a LOT of tube amps there this year.  A "new-old" company called Western Electric exhibited some beautiful hardware, but didn't connect any loudspeakers up to them.  (I think they designed the CNC chassis' first).  I've attached a couple pics.  I had a long talk with Victor Kung (VK Music) who imports Elekit.  There are a lot of SET amplifiers out there with lots of bright chassis work but little or no innovation in their circuits.  One other thing Victor told me was, in the Japanese market where tubes rule, only two output tubes are considered acceptable WRT linearity - the classic 300B power triode, and the ubiquitous EL34 pentode.  The Japanese dislike beam tetrodes and pentodes because the same beam geometry which allows a the screen grid to control a high cathode-to-anode current (i.e. more power) introduces a lot of non-linearity in the basic I-V curve.  They much refer semi-axisymmetric current paths.  So much so that for high power applications, many semi-conductors are more linear.  Victor asked me what is the point of building an expensive beam pentode tube amplifier that sounds like a great solid-state power amplifier (Audio Research), when you can buy a great solid-state amplifier (Pass) which sounds just as good but has many fewer practical problems.

Attendance - about 95% old dudes and 5% women - usually being dragged around by an old dude.  Average price of these systems - too much.  I have no idea how all these companies stay afloat, but it was apparent, just by their locations, who the big, well-established companies are, and who the wannabes are.








pinkfloyd4ever

Re: AXPONA 2019
« Reply #1 on: 20 Apr 2019, 12:50 pm »
Thanks for the write up Don. I’ve never been to one of these shows but have always wondered what they’re like. So thanks for the review!  :thumb:

jibzilla

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Re: AXPONA 2019
« Reply #2 on: 21 Apr 2019, 09:21 pm »
Axpona is something everybody should go to once but after that I would not blame anyone for not going again. It is pretty exciting to see everybody's new flagship speakers all in one spot. But they are all prohibitively expensive ($100k) and will probably sound nothing like what they do in their demo room compared to your own home.

What I would really like to see is a CanJam in the Midwest. Headphones, even with background noise, are pretty easy to get a sense of what they sound like in your own home. Sadly the people that run CanJam's view this area as fly over country and use the headphone section at Axpona as an excuse not to have one in the Midwest. The headphone section at Axpona is sad. Not even suppose to bring your own gear.

What is even more irritating is that said website and CanJam's would not be around if not for the Midwest area (where it all started). Now there have been more CanJam's in London, Singapore and China than in the Midwest in the last 20 years. Really sad how political that place has become.

popthinker

Re: AXPONA 2019
« Reply #3 on: 21 Apr 2019, 10:09 pm »
JDS Labs has done a couple of headphone meetups over in Collinsville over the past three years. Cozy, but some fine setups. Give them a call and see if they have another one planned.

jibzilla

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Re: AXPONA 2019
« Reply #4 on: 27 Apr 2019, 01:53 pm »
I have been to all the st.louis meets. Along with a couple meets in Chicago and Nashville.