AXPONA 2026

Well another year has passed, and AXPONA 2026 is in the books. It was another great show by the AXPONA team and the Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Center. Both the show team and the hotel staff were on top of their game every day in my book. Registration was easy, amenities plentiful, and the show layout easy, if extremely large (and that’s a good thing) to follow. For me, it was 3 days chock full of High End Audio nirvana.

I personally don’t think it was possible to see every room and spend enough time to seriously give a listen to all the equipment on display…some of the manufacturers and importers had rooms with active and passive displays, other just one active system…the size of the room often dictated it seemed what they could show. Some of the presenters had multiple rooms with different levels of awesome stereo equipment in them. Some rooms hovered around the low 5 digit system price points up to the mid 6 digits, a few where way up there hovering darn close to a million dollars if you figure in tax! And there were some everywhere in between. There were tubes, solid state, streaming, turntables, CD players, DACs, cables, room and sound treatments, everything and anything you can imagine (and drool over!)

I planned out my weekend around the gear I wanted to see and hear before hand and by choice did not attend any of the seminars or concerts that were offered. While the topics and performers were ones that I know I would have enjoyed, and even though the concerts were in the evening, since the show was only 3 days and not really the “whole” day (10-6 Fri+Sat and 10-4 Sun), I wanted to focus on the gear during the days, and delve at night into some delicious Chicago style deep dish pizza, Italian beef sandwiches and world famous “Chicago dogs”…sorry, but the concerts had to take a back seat to that…if you know…you know!

I’ve already gotten my opinion out of the over-all “best in show” out there in the T10 Bespoke Ear Computers, but here I want to touch on some of what I considered the best in show for the more traditional stereo system set-ups and stay away from those I considered “meh”demonstrations since audiophiles are a vicious angry bunch if you say something less than ethereal but gear they like or more so own…(lets not try to deny it, if you doubt me, try it for yourself and see if your not compared to an uneducated Neanderthal who knows nothing about what music should sound like!) so I’d rather not go down that path here. I do offer some “opinions” of mine as I go along which may still upset some but que sera, sera I guess.

Now I’ll start that right off the bat by saying, I don’t cut much slack to the belief that its okay for equipment to not sound its best given that its in a hotel room and the distributors, manufacturers, presenters, sellers etc., only had a few hours to set their systems up…True as that may be, they were all in the same boat as far as that goes, and some rooms were absolutely brilliant, while others quite honestly failed quite badly in my book.

Personally that tells me either they chose too much “stereo” for the room, or perhaps the gear isn’t as good as some of the 5 and 6 digits price tags would have you believe they are.

Some rooms were chock-full of room treatments from acoustic panels, to wood paneling, to walls of drapery set around the perimeters and plants. Others went for visual displays to augment their demonstrations, (though I don’t know why, unless it was to draw your attention away from what you were listening to or in some way make it better). I saw rooms full of lit candles, mood lighting, land/cityscape projections….and some rooms (usually the best sounding…hmmmm how bout’ that) with none of that at all.

So time for the rubber to meet the road. What rooms to my ears sounded good enough for me to want to own or to warrant their costs or even shoot above their heads?

Without a second thought, I will tell you: The Stereo Haven Room with their set up of Sugden/Jadis electronics, Well Tempered Labs/Dynavector turntable and cartridge, and JM Reynaud Orfeo Jubilee speakers sounded wonderfully lifelike and ballanced in all aspects and completely listening fatigue free. And the music played was music I and many people actually listen to, not the “audiophile” pablum that was running rampant down the halls that’s chosen to show off the best attributes of what their system is “capable” of, not whether people actually listen to that everyday or not (I felt that if I had to listen to The Wellermen sing “Hoist The Colors” or Geoff Castellucci sing “Big John” one more time to show off how deep a pair of mega-buck speakers could go I would go insane!) why they even let me play my own music that I had brought along! I could have sat just in that room for all 3 days and felt I missed nothing elsewhere! True dat!

No real sound treatment either, the room was mostly the room, just proper choice of equipment for the room and then properly set up, by true audiophiles that know more than a thing or two about how a stereo should sound in “real life”

Another fine sounding demo was the Raurk room, featuring their Sabre R stand mount speakers and R610 Streaming Amplifier playing. Beautifully made, simplistic, but had such an inviting natural sound that drew me into the room from the outside. Wonderful soundstage and natural harmonic timbers made it a pleasure to listen to.

 I don’t like to draw prices into things, but let me just say there were a lot of rooms at the show costing a whole lot more, and by whole lot, I mean WHOLE LOT more that what this gear goes for and they could only wish their rooms sounded this good.

 At another end of the price grandiose spectrum if you will, was the DeVore Fidelity room which featured John Devore and his amazing O/Reference 4 piece reference speaker system. Personally, I’ve never met a Devore speaker I didn’t love and even owned a pair myself sometime back a few years, and these as you can imagine, coupled with John’s attention to detail and innate ability of getting the most out of the rooms he shows in, put on tour de force of imaginging and scale in a room of such modest size…though big they did not over power the room, they just sounded wonderful (odd looking turntable though).

Also on the best sound in show list for me was the room from GAIT from Taiwan, who were demo-ing their GlaXfi BSP-24 passive bookshelf speakers with drivers made from all thing, glass! I originally was going to expect lagging “thick” sound because I was expecting the glass drivers to be thick and heavy, ergo slow…boy was I ever wrong!…first off, the tweeter driver is only 15 micons thick and the woofer only 200 microns thick and can withstand 15kg of force!…these drivers were light, fast and delivered sound that was natural had great rhythm and pace and played surprisingly deep bass for drivers and enclosures of its size.

There were also some very, very good sounding rooms from Western HI FI, Holm Audio (who had several good sounding rooms), Quintessence Audio Ltd, HSU Research, Upscale Audio (who were demo-ing a plethora of fine gear from Klipsch, Fyne Audio, Grimm Audio, Dr.Feikert and Musical Fidelity to name a few, (and even had some static displays of equipment I would have loved to have heard such as Reed Muse, Pathos, VPI and more), and, Fidelity Imports who had a bunch of rooms, but which I found the best sounding one to be for my taste was the room playing a pair of Opera speakers (from the Classic line) through Thoress Electronics and Viablue cables.

So there you have it, those are my Best Sound in show choices. Whether you agree or not, that’s your choice, we all hear things differently and listen for things differently….my preference is tonal and harmonic accuracy coupled with soundstage and depth presentation…and most important of all, does it make my foot tap and head shake.

I’m sure you’ve notice that there are some “big” names that conspicuous by their absence from the list. Quite frankly the reason is, I expected more from them…I’m not going to name, what the point, as I said earlier all that does is anger people (some of whom I’m already sure are fuming because what they liked wasn’t named at all)

I get it, that many of these pieces are extremely large and heavy and expensive, and come from some of the most highly respected designers, brands around, and I appreciate that setting them up and tweaking them in such short amount of time to get them to sound their best was a daunting task to say the least, but you know what?…as I said at the beginning, many others did it and their sound blew me away!…so no apologies from me for omitting them.

And also believe me, not everything else was “meh” because I didn’t mention them, I just didn’t have the time or room here to write about everything I heard, and there was a lot systems, I just didn’t have time to see or listen to, so I’m not discounting them or saying those were not as good as anything else.

But I will say, if they want me to consider shelling out 6 figures for their stereo equipment, they better dang well prove to me that its worth it in a real life environment and not just a showroom. And not only that, prove that it is also 10 to 20 times the cost better than those in the other rooms as well, and don’t use that tired old saying of “that extra 1 or 2% of realism costs that much more” on me. Price and historical track record mean little if nothing to me…and don’t try to hide the cost behind exotic rare materials, cases,or fancy finishes either, unless it contributes to the sound they create (which I know they can at times). I care about one thing, and one thing alone…the music…If its expensive but its musically worth it great, I’m in, if its not expensive but musically worth it, great I’m in just the same! But I admit, I saw some things at the show, that had me shaking my head wondering if it made any difference at all to the sound of the music because of what the box it was in was made out of, and not just speakers either, electronics too..

Okay off the soapbox now and back to the show…

One of my favorite things at audio shows is to peruse the Expo Hall, and this was no disappoinment at all…I counted 51 booths, and there were many purveyors of everything from records, to vintage stereo equipment, new stereo equipment (Some of which had their own rooms ion other floors or were on display in various room as well,) rack makers, records cleaners, cableing of every shape size and color, music societies…I stopped at everyone of them (except the booth selling replacement windows…really!?) it was like heaven! Sometimes too in rooms like this, there are smaller, newer makers of gear that haven’t made it into a dedicated room. One such company I discovered is called Pilot Radio, (whose roots went all the way back to 1919) They are “making/re-introducing” tube gear, that  had been made up until the 70’s. From what I was told the great-grandson of the original owner developer/wanted to start the family business up again and with the help of a tube physicist and engineer, took an original example of the amplifier and recreated it using parts available today and launched their first preamplifier  a year ago…I love that sort of entrepreneurial story…The history of rediscovering something old, making it new and up to date. and I will say what I heard in that extremely noisy environment sounded pretty good, so I hope to hear more from them in the hi-fi world and wish them all the success. as they are getting ready to introduce their first integrated amp. And what better place to introduce it to the audio world than AXPONA!?

So with my satchel full of albums, some gear to review and product brochures out the wazoo, I wrapped up a great audio filled weekend (Thank you AXPONA!) and headed home with a smile on my face, full of insights, desires, with some old audio/music beliefs dispelled and some reaffirmed…Looking forward to next year already, only I do hope they lower the prices on the beer and water!

See ya’ there next year!