I agree with all the comments so far that these rooms sounded good with the exception of Vandersteen (at least the big room with the 9s) which sounded truly lousy to me to be honest. That doesn’t mean its not a good speaker but it was in a freaking ballroom for Christ sake, and the two speakers were waaaaaayyy far apart in a virtually empty room 24/7. My best of show goes to Muraudio for producing a moderately priced electrostatic hybrid with a seamless driver blend and absolutely beautiful dispersion characteristics which resulted in a powerful illusion of the real thing when playing classical orchestral works. The Magnepan multi channel room sounded great, as well, as did the Joseph Audio Perspective 2s.
What was your favorite speaker at Axpona 2019
They were all impressive. ..some more than others.....but 20 years ago at the Palmer house Chicago. ...my favorite speaker was the same as it was 2019....its not a rock n roll speaker per say. .....but its the only speaker that could bring me to tears...the MBL Radialstrahler 101E MKII.....there was were few empty seats in that room....maybe one day?....it was a great show ,first class. ..and all the people were very nice and friendly. ....probably the best crowd I've been around in a big event ever......
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Magnepan LRS and as georgehifi mentioned, the ESL 57! Kind of scary that speakers that cost $650 a pair were and were 61 years old respectively were beating everything else. The little LRS had the best imaging at the show and some of the best sound. And the old Quads -- a special pair that’s never been rebuilt -- still do things in the midrange that pretty much nothing can match. Otherwise -- agree with whitestix that the MBL’s were good though when I heard them they weren’t quite doing what they can. I liked the new T+A’s as well, though I thought I heard a slight mismatch between the incredible electrostatic tweeter and the midrange line source and there was too much midbass in the room (a lot of rooms were suffering from this). The Wilsons sounded uniformly good, they thrive in show conditions. They aren’t the most real sounding or transparent speakers, but they’re remarkably free of anything that sounds bad. The B&W’s sounded good. I liked the new little Elacs, too. And the German Physics was good. The Bayz radial tweeter was superb, one of the few speakers that could do a realistic piano (usually only planars and ESL’s can do that) though as with the T+A’s I thought the sound softened a bit as it got down to the dynamic drivers (in the Bayz, the tweeter crosses over at about 2 kHz to a pair of 9" drivers facing up and down respectively). I didn’t think the Magicos were at their best, but I heard a lot of speakers on Friday and I’ve read that exhibitors had fine tuned their rooms by Saturday and Sunday. The Sanders was impressively transparent but sounded too bright to me. The Magnepan 3.7i’s were in too small a room for a five channel setup and sounded OK but weren’t showing the magic I’ve heard from them under better conditions. The Carvers were OK but they weren’t quite gelling, presumably also as a result of show conditions (they made a point of not using room treatment). The PS Audio AN-3 prototypes were interesting, but they were suffering badly from room acoustics and a bit overdriven, and are apparently less adjustable than the production model will be. But the Magnepan LRS was the hit of the show, nothing else touches it for that kind of money and the setup was just great. Interestingly it was using a prototype Magnepan amplifier (fed by a Bryston front end): https://theaudiobeatnik.com/magnepan-lrs-the-most-exciting-speakers-at-axpona/ https://www.stereophile.com/content/magnepan-lrs-loudspeaker |
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