Tampa Audio Show 2025


I skipped last years show mainly because I didn’t like the hotel they were in before and the prior show wasn’t that good overall. This year there were some very very good sounding rooms with some very expensive equipment, $1M+ in price. There were quite a few very good rooms with very reasonably priced equipment too like the Orchard room and the multiple Borreson rooms. 

‘But there were a lot of rooms with expensive equipment that sounded very bad. Some bad enough to leave in less than a minute, some we waited for a couple different songs to play to see if it was just the song. In all cases, it wasn’t the song causing the issue. In some of  these rooms, the bass sounded terrible, overly rich sounding, distorted, some just over powering the room. Some of us thought a couple of speakers blew out their tweeters they sounded so bad. A couple of these bad sounding rooms had the darling speakers of the audio mags with prices north of $170k. I’m curious if the audio mags will call out these bad sounding rooms like they did a couple,e years ago at axpona, or give us the rooms sounded very good to not bash any manufacturer.

rbstehno

It always goes back to it's all about the room, regardless of the price of the equipment.

Short of trying equipment in your own listening room, a lot of time will be wasted in  evaluating equipment in other rooms, regardless of the audio show.

 

Large, expensive speakers are never going to sound good in a deluxe hotel bedroom.

For home systems, I agree. For hotel rooms, yes and no. There were a half dozen rooms that sounded excellent. These rooms had some of the largest speakers at the show. A couple systems cost close to $2M. These large speakers had some of the bigger rooms. Other bigger speakers in appropriate sized rooms sounded like $&!$.

Other rooms were smaller but the dealer brought larger speakers that sounded terrible. This is the dealers fault. Then there were many rooms that were on the smaller side but they brought size appropriate speakers and they sounded very good. 

I bought a pair of speakers that I heard at rmaf and couldn’t be happier. I knew what their potential sound was and I knew in my room they would sound even better, and they were