As We See It

Though I'm writing this in early March, this As We See It column will be published in the May issue, which is the issue that will go to AXPONA, America's largest audio show, held each non-pandemic year at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center near Chicago. This year's show takes place Friday–Sunday, April 12–14. The show opens each day at 10am and closes at 6pm Friday and Saturday; Sunday's closing time is 4pm. If you're going to the show, don't forget to stop by the Stereophile booth, Location 9213 in the exhibit hall.

According to the show website, this should be the biggest AXPONA ever, with more than 600 brands represented in 200 rooms. There's a headphone show ("Ear Gear Experience") and a record fair. Many folks from the industry will be making presentations, on topics including electronic design, acoustics, vinyl setup, pressing vinyl records, and much else. Absolutely not to be missed: "The Steve and Herb Show," featuring Audiophiliac Steve Guttenberg and Stereophile's own Herb Reichert, Saturday at 1pm in Schaumburg East.

At a show like AXPONA, the real attraction is those 200 listening rooms, where every year, quite a few companies demonstrate new products. It's early still as I write this, but I asked the show organizers to send me a list of product debuts, and they were able to send a few. T+A will debut the Criterion S 230 loudspeaker; see the related item in Industry Update. Phillips Design, which I know mainly for the omnidirectional OH-16, is launching a new model called the Diamond, said to be a highly customizable true-dipole, open-baffle speaker with built-in amplification and DSP, made from "premium hardwoods." A possible match: VPE Electrodynamics is introducing the Model 2 DSP Dipole woofer, intended to match the dipole radiation pattern of planar loudspeakers.

The digital wizards at Grimm Audio are launching the MU2—Stereophile review forthcoming—which combines a Roon server with what sounds like a very innovative DAC and an analog preamplifier: Just add amplification and a pair of speakers (or perhaps a pair of Grimm's own active digital monitors) and you're ready to make music.

If you're presenting at the show, you really should read "Showing Your Best," a Re-Tales column from the April issue by Jason Victor Serinus and me offering tips on putting your best foot forward at an audio show. Light your system well for photography (not from behind). Remember to bring your dusting cloth and use it frequently.

Another piece of advice we gave in that column was to play real music—to resist the temptation to play the same old standards and hi-fi novelty tunes. There's a deep, radical principle behind this suggestion, although it's also kind of obvious: The point of a really good hi-fi system is not to show it off to your friends and neighbors (though there's no harm in that) but to convey music's emotion as directly and powerfully as possible. To show that your system is capable of that, skip the sound-effects tracks and songs so deeply familiar they provoke some of us to flee, hands over ears.

Not that you shouldn't play something familiar. When I sent a query to several veteran show attendees, Rob Schryer responded, "I like the idea of exhibitors playing music that more visitors are familiar with and have a sonic baseline for." Excellent point. Rob recommends Pink Floyd—but maybe not the Pink Floyd you're thinking of. Rob suggests Echoes (The Best of Pink Floyd). "The album has many of Pink Floyd's signature tunes, but what's fun about this collection is its sound quality—it was the best I'd heard these songs from any of the many earlier editions I'd heard them on, CD or LP: great tone, dynamics, spatial effects, deep bass, clean highs, solid images with air around them, etc."

Rogier van Bakel recommended a song that, though obscure, has been heard at hi-fi shows before. He calls "The Incredibles" by Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band "a witty, exciting big-band orchestral piece." It's from the album The Gordian Knot, released in 2019 and available on LP, CD, and streaming. It's eight minutes long; you decide whether to play the whole thing. Rogier also recommended "Chorale" by Philip Glass, performed by Slagwerk Den Haag, off Vitreous Body: "It's an all-acoustic percussion piece, incredibly well recorded."

Compared to that, my own suggestion is a little bit boring, the sort of thing one often hears at audio shows because it's good. Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else is an all-time classic jazz album—one of a handful of albums that almost everyone knows at least a little bit, up there with Kind of Blue, Take Five, and The Blues and the Abstract Truth. It's great jazz that's easy to listen to—and, with the caveat that I've never heard a pristine original, I've never heard it sound better than it does on the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab Ultradisc One-Step pressing. If your room has an analog source and you don't have this album, run over to the record fair. Assuming it hasn't sold out by showtime, I'll suggest they bring some extra copies. There's also a hybrid SACD.

Jason Victor Serinus loves classical music and opera more than many people love life. What I love is his first suggestion. "If you dare play something mono from 1944, tenor Jussi Björling's incomparable rendition of Puccini's 'Nessun dorma' (from Turandot) brought down the house at a recent meeting of Pittsburgh Opera and Symphony professionals." Can your demo system put across the emotion of an 80-year-old album?

Jason, who was apparently fixated on "Nessun dorma," continued. "If you must have stereo, opt for Luciano Pavarotti's 1972 rendition from the complete recording of Turandot conducted by Zubin Mehta.

"If you want to hold them for 10 minutes or longer, play Maria Callas's superbly recorded 1958 rendition of the sleepwalking scene from Verdi's Macbeth, conducted by Nicola Rescigno. The 24/96 remastering from 2023 will send chills up their spines, and the soundstaging is superb.

"Want something gorgeous and French? Cue up Véronique Gens singing Guillaume Lekeu's 'Nocturne' with chamber orchestra accompaniment." Who doesn't want something gorgeous and French?