AXPONA 2017 REPORT

[Bubo]

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Chris A]

17 minutes ago, Bubo said:

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.