PAF 2023

Walking into one of the rooms hosted by Middle River, MD audio dealer Just Audio was a bit of a surprise, and to quote Yogi Berra, "It's like déjà vu all over again."

The first things I saw were the Mission 770—reviewed by JA1 in November 2022 and Mission 700 loudspeakers. They were flanked by display boards that rocked me back to the mid-1980s, when I was deciding between the Missions and Celestion 6s. Tom Bryant of Just Audio explained that Mission didn't want to build a part-for-part recreation of the speakers, or to build 770s using new parts. The goal was to design and build a thoroughly modern speaker that that resembled the original as closely as possible but could compete with anything being built today.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I headed for the Angel City Audio room at PAF 2024—were they a dealer? A distributor? A manufacturer? After chatting with ACA's owner Hugh Nguyen (above), I can say that the answer fell somewhere between "all three" and "it depends."

At every show, I make it point to visit at least one company making their debut at the show AT PAF 2023, it was Bella Sound, based in Half Moon Bay, CA, and the offspring of Mike and Barbara Vice. Mike Vice described their path to PAF 2023 as having begun around 2010 with what was to be their first product, the Hanalei power amplifier. It had been ten years in the making and wowed everyone who heard it, but Mike decided that it "just wasn't ready". After eight more years of refining the Hanalei and developing a few other components, Mike and Barbara decided that the time was right and created Bella Sound. Add another 5 years and the COVID-19 lockdown, and here they were.

In the hallway outside the JMF Audio/Ideon Audio room, Benno Baun Meldgaard, former speaker designer for Gamut, Raidho, and Gryphon, discussed his prototype Hydra loudspeaker. Expected in October, the cost for the for the entry-level 3-way floorstander—the smallest model in Baun's forthcoming Reference line of speakers—is projected at "around $150,000/pair."

"It's the gateway drug to the High End," Vanatoo's Rick Kernan quipped of the larger of Vanatoo's two diminutive active loudspeakers. He was speaking of the successor to the Vanatoo Transparent One Encore that I reviewed in 2019, the Transparent One Encore Plus (T1E+) active loudspeaker ($650/pair, up from $599/pair four years ago).

One of the highlights of my visit to PAF 2023 was the debut of Klaudio's $80,000 Magnezar Turntable. The world of super-premium turntables is curiously large and active these days, and it's not that surprising to hear of another one hitting the market. From the first glance, though, it was obvious that Klaudio's Magnezar was something extraordinary.

The relationship between Linear Tube Audio (LTA) and Daedalus Audio loudspeakers is so close that the special pair of LTA 20Wpc Ultralinear+ power amplifier monoblocks ($6800/each) on display in room 2106 at PAF—the second of these companies' two joint rooms—boasted a custom faceplate designed specifically for their owner, Daedalus founder Lou Hinkley.