Who is excited about Capital Audiofest 2023?

I Purchased the BACCH4Mac earlier this week, not the universal, but the one step up so that I can use the optional in ear mics… 3-4 week lead time.  I plan on visiting booth 549.  
 

The rest of my system is solid, and I’m very happy with the sound in my basement…. so will be looking for generally interesting, and innovative products and concepts versus trying to solve a specific problem  

This will be my first show in a decade. 
 

I went today...

• Caladans: wasn’t my music choice, sounded a bit thin lacked lower end gravitas.. but nice and tight, fast, and great tone in the mids and decent highs. a lot of speaker for the price
• Easiest to listen to: NSMT (monitors+bandpass sub combo) smooth and true.
• 300B integrated that caught my eye: the Westinghouse 91E (it was driving the top full range driver only of an active sub tower) didn’t love the bass/midbass integration - which wasn't powered by the Westinghouse, rather the active speaker itself. I would have liked to have seen them driving a speaker full range alone, 25 watts per channel after all. A 5 year warranty on 300B tubes (!)
• Worst sound: didn’t note the brand, a larger 3rd floor mini ball room was open baffle 7’ tall ribbon/planar + bass modules (4 towers total) maybe too far away from the back wall but sounded very thin and hotel california was painfully edgy.
• The horns in the Viva room had a surprisingly (albeit narry) honky tone in the upper bass/lower mid that was distracting
• MBL - first time in person, impressive
• My favorite of the day: Consonos, their midbass (open baffle) and sealed sub blended beautifully. it’s a 4 way with the 3 higher freq drivers being open baffle and highest 2 are planar drivers. The source was a Mytek Empire and their in-house amps were hidden (their faceplates didn’t make it to the show so they put them behind a curtain). Supposedly each driver is actively driven by it’s own 400w amp, so 8 amp channels in total. I think the speakers are $17k and the speakers + amps are $70k, so with the Mytek it’s < $100k. Trounced some other $200-300k combos. (I was in the room at a less busy time and he played several requests of songs I know well, I went straight home and compared - damn... damn.... damn...)
• several separate beautiful recordplayer setups played dirty records, annoying pops and such during playback...
• Oh the bacch-sp was cool not too exaggerated to be fake, he also took requests. I am eager to get my setup, was able to talk to the founder/professor - said they’d be shipping my kit next week so will report back on how it works in a new thread.