AXPONA was an experience to behold. As far as the conference was concerned, there was a lot going on -a large hall that housed local guys doing sales of vintage audio and consignment, vintage repair services, ultrasonic vinyl cleaning machines, cable sales, record sales, and various vendors. There was a hall that was purely headphones and headphone/turntable preamps and also a hall devoted to car audio. In addition, there were lots of listening/reviewing rooms on the first 4 floors with dealers, components, and their accompanying speakers, and in addition there was 12 floors of listening rooms for audio.
There were 2 pair of speakers really stood out above all the rest. One was the Avantgarde Mezzo speakers, and the others were the MBL Speakers. These 2 needed nothing in my estimation. I sat in the “sweet” spot area of almost all the speakers when I was listening. Some had interesting experiences with imaging, separation, range and clarity. Some speakers were better than others. Some sonic ranges were better than others – some, you’d definitely need an equalizer. Some you’d need to augment with a sub.
Everything else were varying degrees of ho-hum. That said… there were 2 other standouts from the pack – a pair of bookshelf speakers that sounded better than most floor speakers – Elac (the company name) that made a pair of bookshelf speakers that I understood to be less than 1k$ and they had a better range than most of what I heard – both bookshelf ad floor standing. I will have to find out what the others were, but they were floor standers and while they didn’t impress me by sight, suffice it to say that their sound really impressed me. Thankfully, I actually know the sales guy (well, my buddy Joe does).
-Rat
