AXPONA 2018 Sights and Sounds

April 25th, 2018
By: Carlin "Rick" Smith

The AXPONA 2018 show has come to end and I was there Friday and Saturday of the show.  Below are some pictures and there are many others out there from various sources.

First some general thoughts.

AXPONA was in a new location about ten miles further north at Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Center.  I personally loved the new venue as the majority of listening rooms were around an open atrium meaning the rooms were only on one side of the floor which helped greatly with people traffic flow.  The rooms were about the same size as the Westin but there were taller ceilings. The areas for the marketplace were larger and having parking right at the venue for free was a nice addition.

Nice sounding horn speakers

Another set of horns

Small Aurender N100C

PranaFidelity Speakers

Griffin Audio Speakers

Joseph Audio Pearl 3

Joseph Audio Room with Jeff Rowland Gear

Pass Labs

Bob Carver speakers - sounded very good

Bob Carver Amplifier 

Parasound JC5 (unreleased stereo version of utilizing approaches from the award winning JC1)

Dynaudio Speakers

Aurender W20 with Berkeley Audio Reference 2 MQA DAC

Unreleased Aurender ACS 10 Content Server and Music Server to be released this summer (RIP and Metadata editing without a computer)

Unreleased Aurender ACS 10 back view

Benchmark Gear

Bel Canto Black Ex equipment

Closer view of Bel Canto Black Ex Gear

Mark Levinson Gear

New Monitor Audio Studio

New Monitor Audio Studio back picture

Sonus Faber Kanta Speakers

McIntosh Gear

Sonus Faber SF16

Sonus Faber and Audio Research Amplifiers

Wilson Audio and the new Audio Research REF 160M amplifiers - great sounding room