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Category: Jason Thorpe

We’re a gregarious bunch, for the most part, here in our little community of nine townhouses. An open garage with a running power tool is often all it’ll take for one or two neighbors to amble over and see what’s up.

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Category: Jason Thorpe

As you may have read in my November editorial over at SoundStage! Ultra, it’s been a busy, nutty time in and out of my listening room over the past couple of weeks. In late October, just before penning that editorial, I had to figure out how to receive the brand-new, first-in-North America Epikore 9 speakers DALI had just shipped.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

The Golden Tulip is another trendy hotel just across the way from the Radisson Blu Sobieski, which is where we stayed and where the majority of exhibitors at Audio Video Show 2024 were located for the previous three days. It’s a much smaller show area, but it’s disproportionately packed with gems, especially since much of the exhibition space is divided across conference rooms that are large enough to really show the capabilities of an ultra-high-end system. Destination Audio didn’t reserve one of those huge spaces, though I kind of think they’re better off for it, frankly.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

It seems that every audio show you go to will have at least one manufacturer who completely sideswipes you. It’s usually the local guys, folks who are at only their first or second show and seem a little bit nervous about being on such a big stage. It goes like this: you enter half a dozen rooms that have you leaving after four or five minutes, saying, “Hmm, yes, very nice.” And then you wander into a room that knocks you on your ass. This time, it was ElinsAudio’s.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

It’s not often I find a vinyl-related product that intimidates me. Turntables, no matter how large or complicated, generally distill down to simple components with known operating principles. Perhaps the most complicated products out there are air-bearing turntables and tonearms, but even these are fairly easy to understand and operate. The air-bearing platter floats like a hovercraft, and the air-bearing tonearm is a tube that rides in a sleeve. Not that hard to understand, right?

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

Over the past few years, Pro-Ject Audio Systems, the Austrian manufacturer of turntables of all sizes and types, has focused on affordable ’tables, seemingly at the expense of its higher-end models. Who can blame the brand? The vinyl revival has undoubtedly been a goldmine for Pro-Ject. Churning out thousands of affordable turntables just has to be more profitable than a slow trickle of high-priced audiophile models.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

It’s so very true that many audiophile speakers can’t rock out. Oh sure, a well-designed speaker should be able to play any kind of music satisfactorily, but audiophiles seem to value the dainty attributes of speakers over sheer muscle.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

We got ditched for dinner. SoundStage! Ultra’s senior editor, Jason Thorpe, and I were left to our own devices by SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider the other night. “Not coming,” he’d texted us. “Dinner with this Norwegian brand.” We didn’t think much of it till we wandered into a room put together by someone we’d never heard of here at the Radisson Blu Sobieski, one of the three Audio Video Show 2024 locations. “You know these guys?” Jason asked in a text to Doug.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

As the boys and I—and by “boys,” I mean SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider and Ultra editor Jason Thorpe—finished our survey of PGE Narodowy, we wandered into Polish distributor SoundClub’s room. Though it wasn’t a part of the Super-System Alley we’d just checked out, the EgglestonWorks loudspeakers displayed were brain-meltingly good. They are also wallet-meltingly expensive. As the distributor is based in Poland, all the prices that follow are in zlotys.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

If you’ve read some of my output on SoundStage! Hi-Fi, you’ve probably picked up that I’m quite fond of DIY audio. I’ll cop to regularly visiting the DIY Audio Forum, North America’s premier message board for building amps, DACs, speakers, and more. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Poland has a DIY forum of its own, and then multiply that by about a billion when I found that the moderators of the site had ponied up for a room at this year’s Audio Video Show.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

Here at SoundStage!, we would never write up an audio manufacturer in exchange for favors like fancy dinners. To do so would be a serious breach of journalistic ethics, would call into question our authority on the subject, and worst of all, would place at risk the trust our readers have in us, which we’ve worked for years to build. Anyway, after a tour of its facility in Pruszków and a dinner of traditional Polish dishes, culminating with a prime cut of top sirloin, grilled to a perfect medium rare and served with a peppercorn sauce, here’s what you need to know about Ferrum Audio.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

Matt Bonaccio and I opted for a top-down approach to the exhibits at the Radisson Blu Sobieski location at Audio Video Show 2024. So we climbed up the stairs to the seventh floor and walked to the far end of the corridor.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

The Dark Side of the Moon has become a parody of itself. I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan, but I don’t tend to listen to DSOTM because it’s been so ridiculously overplayed. I originally sat down in the Homogenix room intending to bide my time until I could get some information about this brand-new company’s line of cartridges. But “Time” rocketed out of these dramatic, odd horn speakers with such authority, and at such high levels, that it made me giggle. These horn speakers and this cartridge made me sit through the entirety of side 1. That’s saying something. There was huge power here, with minimal horn colorations. Deep bass, perhaps missing the ultimate extension, but tight as a fish’s ass. These are huge speakers in a small room, but my stars, did it work as a whole.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

If you want to go to Poland’s annual Audio Video Show—or any trade expo, for that matter—it’s wise to plan your trip to avoid the crowds, if at all possible. Doug Schneider, Jason Thorpe, and I judiciously chose to focus our first day on PGE Narodowy, Warsaw’s huge sporting stadium and event center. As I entered the concourse dedicated to exhibiting all things ’phones, I recalled the throngs filling this space at last year’s event, and silently thanked Doug for pushing to go here first. The hall was still nearly empty; I’d have full access to brand reps and distributors as I tested out the latest offerings. Here’s what I found. Take note of the prices, as they are presented here in both US dollars and Polish zlotys.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

There’s a hallway in Warsaw’s PGE Narodowy Stadium that houses several rooms designed for recording television broadcasts at sporting events. These rooms are acoustically treated, large in size, and typically locked down yearly by exhibitors showing the largest, most expensive systems.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

On the first day of Audio Video Show 2024, Doug Schneider, Matt Bonaccio, and I walked into the main entrance of Warsaw’s PGE stadium, and the first room we saw was the Marantz suite, which featured the new Model 10 integrated amplifier (zł63,999, all prices in Polish złotys), SACD 10 player (zł34,999), and Link 10n streamer (zł39,498). This was oddly coincidental, as just that morning, we had reached out to Marantz to request review samples of these tasty, sexy components.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

To put Devialet’s latest product into proper perspective, I feel compelled to give my take on the company’s history. The beginnings of the French brand were straightforward enough, but over the years, the company became weirder, more confusing, and more mysterious. But let me emphasize, the following history is given from my perspective.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2024

In his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson postulated that jet lag is the result of the late arrival of your soul as it catches up with your body. Since your soul can’t travel as fast as a jet, you have to wait for it to arrive, like lost luggage.

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Category: UK Hi-Fi Show Live 2024

The final day at Ascot opened with still a great deal to see and hear. Doug Schneider was staying at a Heathrow hotel with the EISA crowd, while I was ensconced in luxury at the Macdonald Berystede Hotel & Spa, very close to Royal Ascot. The short drive in each day told me all I needed to know about the area: the only automotive dealer enroute sells McLaren cars, which are, naturally, equipped with sound systems from Bowers & Wilkins.

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Category: UK Hi-Fi Show Live 2024

The 2024 edition of UK Hi-Fi Show Live took place on the weekend of September 22–24 at its impressive customary venue, the Royal Ascot Racecourse Grandstand. As usual, there was a plethora of audio brands on display. This show has had an uneven ride in recent years. It was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID pandemic, and then cancelled again in 2022 due to the death of Her Majesty the Queen—the venue is part of the Crown estate. It ran successfully in 2023, but then, a couple of weeks before the 2024 show, part of the main roof at Ascot blew off in a freak storm. Thankfully, show organizer Paul Miller of Hi-Fi News fame was able to relocate some of the top-floor exhibitors to lower floors, and the show went ahead on schedule.

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Vitus Audio
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