Thoughts on T.H.E. Show in Long Beach this weekend?

I attended Saturday and Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed the show this year.  I'm not certain on the number of exhibitors this year compared to 2021, but my impression is that there were more and better quality rooms overall than last year.  

It's tough for me to give impressions on individual components because attendees really only had the opportunity to hear systems (versus A/B'ing specific components within a system), but I enjoyed the Acora, Wilson Benisch, and all of the Common Wave HiFi rooms a great deal.  There are probably another dozen or so rooms that I also had really positive impressions of.

@oczed please tell us more about the Acora experience. What other equipment was being used, was it a large room like Axpona? It was one of my favorite speakers at Axpona but they also had like $500,000 of gear behind it. 

The Acora room presented a clear and detailed, but not piercing presentation.  I would liken it to a clear mountain stream.  The 2.5 floorstanders provided an even frequency response with enough bass to be sufficient on their own.  I heard a brief demo of the standmounts which were really impressive in terms of speed and articulation. (A track from the original McGlaughlin, DiMeola & De Lucia album was played.)  They didn't have as much bass as the floorstanders, but the low frequencies were still impressive for the size of the speaker and the size of the ballroom they were playing in.

I didn't pay too much attention to the components they were paired with, although I noticed the floorstanders had the Silversmith Fidelium speaker cables.  Both sets of speakers were also using tube monoblocks.  I believe the standmounts also had a VAC preamp.  Each system also had one of the high end Lampizator DACs, although vinyl was only played during all of our visits in the room.

I really loved the Acoras and would be very happy listening to them over the long term, but unfortunately they aren't practical for my listening space given their size and weight.  

I've heard the floorstanding Acoras a few times at other shows and ended up staying longer than I should have. I remember when they first appeared and thought they were trying too hard and too naively with granite. Time and perseverance appears to have been worth it as they have garnered solid reviews and (I believe) best sound of the show at AXPONA.