Agree on the Von Schweikert new Ulta 7's. Although rather diminutive in size compared to the other big boys, their price was not at $180,000 but they sounded fantastic. I stayed there for a long time. And who can fault the Estalon flagship at $160,000. Magic. I also was very impressed by the Legacy Aries at a mere $10,500 a pair. Stayed there a long time also. These were all in big convention size rooms and a lot of attention was paid to controlling acoustics. There were many fine sounding speakers in the smaller hotel rooms - too many to remember. Interesting that VAC electronics was predominant. The Cabresse room, featuring small baseball sized speakers putting out a lot of good sound was an engineering marvel. But as a Focal Fan - having traded up from my trusty Electra 237's to the Sopra 2's, I was appalled by their exhibit room - in one of the big rooms. They had a huge counter at the entrance where they were selling stuff with loads of people creating a din of noise. They also had a home entertainment section in the back which played loud distracting heavy bass music. But the worst part was their demo of one of the Utopia models - heavy bass dominant music played extremely loud by some kid to overcome the noise. They sounded awful and were unlistenable and I had to leave the room. They were also demo-ing Kanta 2's in a corner where you could hardly hear them, like at a cheap mid-fi store. Since I had the money to spend for the Sopra's and already ordered them (maxing out my credit cards), if I hadn't purchased them already I would never have done do based on the terrible demo of the much more expensive Utopias. There were plenty others to chose from at that price or less. A failed business model for an exhibit of well-regarded speakers. Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed Axpona.
Axpona 2022 what impressed you?
I'll start. The Borrensen 01 playing Otis Taylor 'Resurrection blues' was stunning! I also enjoyed the Legacy Aeris on the first floor playing Nils lofgren 'Keith don't go'. In the smaller rooms there was a $4k pair of speakers with what looked like 18" woofers and a horn tweeter that performed well. While the kef ref 3 sounded harsh the ref 5 in a similar small room sounded great just reminding me how much incremental set up affects the demo. I only had a few hours on saturday and missed many rooms due to crowds and would enjoy hearing others impressions from the show.