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In each area, when I listened, I rated the products as in the top tier or not So there were As and also rans, there are too many choices to settle for less. More price doesn't equate to an A rank. Neither does reputation or hype. There are definitely some companies that consistently put out good product, but not all are As Some McIntosh amps are loved more than others. For example, an honest headphone bake off needs everything the same except for the headphones. Same is true for any bake off. General Impressions Show was very busy, near parking filled up fast Lots of exhibitors, maybe more than the previous years Lots of people fly in to attend the show, shows commitment The action in audio is in the Headphones, Head gear, and Digital amps Most of the audio market by volume is the Smart Phone and powered speakers, some foot print at the show, but the focus is on the big ticket iron and lots of exotic designs. Lots of massive amplifiers with machined aluminum cases producing lots of watts for inefficient speakers. New speaker concepts still showing up, - Endow Audio.com has new horn I haven't seen before. Chattanooga TN. The Name Klipsch didn't appear in the show guide, or the show directory and maps in the atrium, maybe decided to attend late. K-Horns were in the Esoteric room, sounded pretty good. Only heritage on site. Demos are risky given the rooms and other challenges, like which amp would you rather demo with or source material I visited floors 6 and above and the ground floor and Mezzanine exhibits, nothing struck me as the product of the year, perhaps I have become jaded. There is no correlation between price and sound quality at the show, perhaps also true at home as someone convinces themselves it sounds great. All of the Integrated and pre amp makers must add tape in/out RCA interfaces to their units so Equalizers and other gear can be inserted into the signal path for modification and enhancement. More Amps are adding Meters, it's nice to see what the thing is doing. Knobs, meters, dials, gauges, buttons, lights, bouncing bar graphs not only make me happy, I can see what the gear is doing. The standout at the show was little Emo aka Emotiva of Nashville. -Instead of a demo room they had a standard trade show booth in the exhibit hall, look muscular with all of their product offerings on display. No demos. Their sheet metal cases are good enough IMHO, flat black like old Yamaha. Aesthetics are good, they got prettier. Almost every demo room, the volume was way too loud, maybe why I like Emo's silent booth so much. Almost no one inc me brought a pen, the salesmen sure didn't. Weird. HEAPHONES They had their own exhibit room, where the action is. Demos sound like 20 people around you talking, closed cans are slightly better. Still worth spending some time. So many great headphones, IMHO declining marginal returns begin setting in around $200 and peak around $350 Lots of head amps, dacs, all kinds of cans, many sound great. CABLES 14GA and lamp cords unless you are running distance or in the walls, then twisted pairs Shielded line level and other source cables aka USB, Ethernet etc Everything else is snake oil IMHO. HIGH PERFORMANCE POWER CORDS Sucker born every minute DACS $250 is the sweet spot, IMHO if the unit does more aka pre amp, wifi, blutooth, HQ head amp, bouncing meters etc then maybe more money. Gallons of snake oil in this segment. Most are the Delta Sigma designs, there can't be that many DS chip sets on the market INTERNET SERVERS No one can explain why I need one at the shows I couldn't act dumber when asking for an explanation. Buy a laptop, or use an old one and be done with it, $400 - coupled with a wireless keyboard, fit, form and function are superior I use my laptop display or 50 inch plasma display when surfing. The US salesman reping Aurender Korea at the show - explained to me that their server "was like a record player", and I "couldn't buy one at Best Buy". - I think they were asking $10-20K for their server, which my old laptop blows away. Bigger display too. Verdict Snake Oil. DIGITAL AMPS This is one area where I believe performance and quality gains are being made, and drastic price performance improvements and next gens of chip sets entering the market. Techincs has their own digital amp they are very proud of, their demo sounded pretty good. All techincs gear 11 Channel surround amps are definitely a driver in the segment, but also in the high watt stereo systems. AMPLIFIERS- INTEGRATED AMPS The sweet spot in Solid State, if you only want 50 watts. $350-500 you are in like Flynn. There are lots of great choices in the integrates from every manufacturer. Uber competitive segment. Yamaha offering an entry product and ladder of integrated more for your money products. If you are running Klipsch heritage, the question is what does the first .5 watt sound like ? Component systems SS For me, Yamaha, McIntosh, Pass, are all safe bets and in the same sweet spot $ 7.5 - 15K I would have to do more homework on Pass before throwing down the cash. I am all in with Klipsch for 45 years, so I don't need hundreds of watts. Accuphase was there, but they sounded terrible in the demo room. Speakers, room, source ? If you want tubes, the options are limitless with Klipsch, you don't need many watts. I would limit my search to less than 30W amps If your speakers need 30-50 watts to turn on and 100 to do anything then you are into different manufacturers. Class D and the new performance chips, are the only hope of affordability if you need hundreds of watts. TURNTABLES ARE HOT Lots of choices, will any of them last 50 years like my old Duals ? Using gold vs dollars, my old Dual would be around $3K in today money Declining marginal returns set in fast at around $300-500 IMHO Denon has one that resembles the units they made in years gone by, I should have looked for it. I took some photos, but too much of a hassle shrinking them to fit here. Good sounding headphone amp from Poland, OTL design $1K Closed cans helped, but detailed and sweet Headphone hall is noisy, but you can get a good listen with some work. https://upscaleaudio.com/products/feliks-audio-echo-mk-ii-headphone-amplifier Audio Research and McIntosh were the winners for meters, big meters These were interesting, sounded pretty good, I think the salesman said $70K Diptyque audio is a unique concept of flat speakers, high fidelity, made in France, but we are convinced that the one that brings together the most advantages and allows music to be reproduced most naturally are isodynamic loudspeakers, also called Magnetostatic. https://fidelityimports.com/pages/diptyque-audio

Drinking my coffee and looking out the window, it looked like a good day for pulling weeds, so I grabbed my backpack and headed off to AXPONA near O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Clear blue skies, 25 minutes later, and the weeds in the rear view mirror......I arrived. All of the usual suspects were at the show, which is moving to a larger venue next year, and since the show was only 10-4pm on Sunday. I hit less than 10% of the rooms. Two speakers and a monster mono amp system can still be had for $50-150K...... Looked at two Mac 1000W mono blocks, you would need a tow truck to lift them. Marketplace Room I did a quick pass through the market place, and headed for the headphones....which IMHO is where the action, and money are in audio. Marketplace: $60 Moomat.com cow and cork turntable mats were interesting; along with "delmark".com recording studio and label in Chicago. Steve at delmark, if recording in Chicago, would be worth interviewing....can always tell when someone loves their craft. Note: I am consistently amazed by the number, small but memorable, of booth staff who's personalities are best suited for night staff janitorial services....working alone. Ear Gear Room Headphones could easily be their biggest room, or series of continuous rooms, there are so many new models and headphone amps. Lots of open and closed cans and in the ear models; the open cans are difficult to appreciate in a large noisy space. It would be easy to leave with a dozen pairs of new headphones and amps to go with them ..............Lacking funds and space I left empty handed, funds the limiting factor. If you have an extra $2000 laying around, or can rationalize the purchase as a "necessity", MrSpeaker.com closed cans would be an easy decision. Reminds me of the Yamaha Mario Bellini headphone sling design, an all time favorite. https://www.alpha-audio.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/etherc.jpg Reel to Reel Decks were everywhere....would gladly see them swapped out for booth bunnies..... BASF is back in the tape business, and ...was it 1 and 2 inch studio tape is available $$$$$ Steve at delmark told me his deck runs at 30 inches per second ....lots of musicians want to record all analog, but the cost of 10 reels takes their breath away. Product of the Show IMHO Sugarcube by Sweetvinyl.com In a nutshell, this product does real-time D/A and A/D conversion and uses proprietary algorithms for encoding and noise removal, it can be connected to a local storage device like a USB stick or to a 4tb hard disk etc, or networked to a NAS disk array, preferably RAID, with all of your nice recordings. Functional description: drop the needle on the record, auto master a digital version with auto LP title and track listings (think the buzzword is meta data) auto pop and click removal while not destroying the dynamic range on the recording. You can do this while listening to the record real time, source, or cleaned up version. Alternatives: Lots of AD DA converters on the market...... Focusrite getting the most love McIntosh has their new Phono Pre Amp with AD conversion built it, but does it do DA playback? PC software for pops and clicks, some better than others ION etc turntables with built in pop click software, probably not as good as the above.

Following are my unscientific biased observations from the 2016 show held near O'Hare Airport. In no particular order. Facilities Westin Hotels continue as top shelf properties. Friday Parking was frustrating 45 mins to find a spot, Saturday was zero minutes to find a spot. Hotel says parking is a work in progress. Approximately 6 floors of vendors, 4 are in hotel rooms which isn't bad in many cases. Axpona Staff friendly and efficient as usual. After hours entertainment was a nice touch. Admission was $30 a day at the door, which seemed fair. Show General Info While almost everything imaginable is available on line and in PDF formats, it's still a good idea to bring cut sheets and or a brochure to trade shows. Not all vendors know this, including some of the ones that want $$$$. Almost all of the vendors are very accommodating if you bring a CD, USB stick or favorite movie with you. Uncompressed lossless is your best chance of getting your sample to play. If you want to lug a vinyl record around, most have turntables connected since vinyl is hot. Bring music you know well if you want to get a feel for the gear. If you want to photograph the gear, ask permission. My baseline for Evaluation Like most of us, my home system is my control baseline for evaluating the gear at the show. Mine is McIntosh TOTL circa 1980 driving Klipsch LaScalas using an EQ. For control, I use a pair of AKG 702 headphones jacked into the C-32 pre amp to compare to what is coming out of the Speakers. After 35 years I am convinced that PWK liked to hear the Angels sing, and there is still no other speaker that I have found that is better for listening to female vocals, almost entirely on the mid range horns. I think my Yamaha MX-600 and MX-800 amps sound a little sweeter than the Mc-2205 Amp and have better damping greater than 20, which I understand to be the magic number. But I like the blue glow, so it's all Mac on my 2 Ch rig. General Observations Every piece of Equipment begins life as a product definition, then a set of design goals and a budget. Then the trade-offs and limiting factors begin. After many months of pain and agony, a product is born. No product does everything better than every other product, all represent a series of trade-offs and tech limits, each has a personality. Think of an aircraft carrier vs a submarine. The human voice is the hardest sound to reproduce accurately, and easiest to detect if it's inaccurate. Many, if not most vendors, will play instrumentals........frequently jazz. Unless you are a proficient trumpet, or sax player with good hearing, you won't learn anything. The easiest way to beat on a design and system is Piano with Female Vocal, cymbal hits with the stick are also very telling. Female A Capella or even speaking with a soft voice is very telling. The surround demos focused on robot sounds, and black hole sounds....whatever a black hole is supposed to sound like. Tubes, lots of tubes. Most were disappointing observed in systems. Lots of giant box amplifiers, some with surprisingly small Watt outputs. Apparently, it's easier to make a good to great sounding solid state amps at moderate output levels and a comparatively modest price. Speaker efficiency matters. Turn Tables, lots of turn tables, most fully manual. I like auto pick up for those senior moments when you leave the system on. Many, if not most, of the vendors are garage shops, less than 10 employees. The vendors are incredibly accommodating if you bring your own source, but there are lots of others wanting to play their song. Consequently, it is difficult if not impossible to take the time necessary to break-down the systems to see what they will and won't do and how well they perform different tasks. Bring samples of the music you listen to, favorite singers are best since they will break down the designs sometimes in less than one minute. 3 crossover points is three potential drop outs with a soft voice. Don't be the guy that asks to play one song, then insists on the entire 6 minutes, and then insists on one more song, four times. If they had a bar in the room, I'm certain someone would have thrown a bottle. I am a tire kicker, so I try to respect the vendor's time and limit it to one or two 3 minute or less songs or even change songs after the first minute. If you are there to buy, make appointments and get a demo before the show opens, the intelligent vendors are there to transact. Day one, get to as many as possible and schedule demos for your short list on day two and three. Gear I probably visited less than half of the vendors with 2 days, and many for only a minute. Emotiva was again the vendor with the most trade show professional display and lots of helpful staff. In many ways, they continue to be an innovator in the industry. Some new things work, some don't, but they get up and move to the next one when they do have a fail. Their demo push was the surround receivers and amps, heavy on stuff like the transformers fights and black holes, most of the audience had grey hair. We did sneak in a few 2 ch tracks in the surround theater, Johnny Cash and wife did sound pretty good. Increasingly Made in the USA GIK Acoustics, Atlanta, very helpful Shelly....... everything a sales interaction should be. If in the market for sound treatment home or commercial app panels, I would look at them. Only treatment vendor I spoke with. They ship everywhere. Made in Atlanta Raven Tube and Legacy Speakers, both really nice and helpful. The big Legacys always sound good, it would require time and an intent to purchase to really break them down. Same goes for the Raven gear. Both Made in the USA. Belden Cable makers of the worlds finest Telco and Radio RF cables has entered the high end audio cable market with the Lab Tests and Engineering to back it up. Blue Jeans Cable offers Belden as does a distributor. I forget the exact numbers, but something like twenty-five fifty for a pair, which I thought was great until I put on my glasses and read $2550.00 a pair. Made in the USA. Anti Cables, had a bunch of stuff they make or have made. The guy I spoke with reminded me of all of the good engineers I have worked with in high tech. The products still have to prove out. Their very large toroidal Autoformer aka impedance matching transformer for connecting 4 ohm speakers to 8 ohm amps (where amps are happiest), look interesting. Think large electrostatic or other power hungry speakers that come in 4 ohms. Not sure where made. Seaton Sound supported by Calibrations, had a home theater demo going on the ground floor next door to Emo. Also very helpfully great guys, more than willing to play your song. Seaton is a Direct Sales Speaker Manufacturer that began life in the sub woofer business and still plumbs the depths of low frequencies. Demo room had three 18 inch subs stacked on both sides of the screen, best kick drum I have ever heard, not sure which speakers it came out of. Looked like conventional speaker driver tech. Another Chicago area company. Guessing Made in the USA http://www. promusicaaudio.com/ is a local Chicago Retailer that had a room, I thought they did a great job of demonstrating how good affordable ( a relative term) gear can sound and the single driver (no crossover) speakers they had sounded very good in their space. The Sales guy was very helpful and had good answers. Their demo sounded as good, maybe better than some of the ones that were multiples of their price. Audio Research and Sonus Faber had a very good sounding demo up on the 12th floor, approx $200K out the door. I'm guessing that AR is Made in the US. Classic Audio Loudspeakers with their large Horn Loaded Speakers continues to be a great measuring stick for comparing other speakers, not many sound better and the price points are a good measurement too. At 108db and 105db you don't need a huge amp to drive the speakers. Made in the USA 2015 the reel to reel jumped out. 2016 This year the Grande Avant Garde Speakers (22-20KHz, 89db 1W/M) by www.gershmanacoustics.com totally jumped out of the pack. Rapid dispersion and image were killer in the hotel room. Drivers are staggered like Theil for proper phase alignment. These may be the best small (comparatively) room speakers I have ever heard. IDK price, but in the first 30 seconds these jumped out. Before slapping down the credit card, I would want a full demo with my tunes to determine what they can and can't do.......Made in Canada