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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

I have railed against ugly, boxy, plain speakers on more than one occasion. But I’ve also stated, again, on more than one occasion, that sound quality should come first, should be our first principle. I even recall saying something to the effect of “if a speaker sounds good, we shouldn’t care if it’s made out of concrete, with pieces of rebar sticking out at odd angles.”

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

Despite looking sort of like the furniture from the Swedish chain, the Soft Collective SC‑05 loudspeaker is kind of the anti-Ikea loudspeaker. OK, not entirely, in that it is made in Sweden and has a pale wooden finish. But it’s very un-Ikea-like in its solid-birch construction. The same could be said for its distinctive design, which was developed in cooperation with Gärsnäs, a company that’s been making furniture in Stockholm since 1893. The price tag of €20,000 per pair is very not-Ikea (all prices in euros). And you certainly don’t have to assemble the speakers yourself.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

I never get tired of Vivid’s big, colorful, dramatic speakers. They make me smile every time I see them. I think it’s fair to say that Vivid speakers are the most immediately recognizable products in all of audio.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

Over the last few years, I’ve taken a less visible role in our show-coverage team. Instead of focusing on writing articles, I take most of the photos and edit all of them, and I also create show-based social-media posts. Doing so has freed me up to do more listening, because I’ve been relying on Jason Thorpe and Matt Bonaccio to do the tedious work of gathering detailed product information.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

Audio Video Show is larger this year, with the show organizers having added 25 percent more exhibit space onto the already extensive floor plan at the PGE Narodowy stadium. The additional space comprised large rooms that sounded especially good, probably due to optimal damping and irregular wall and floor layouts.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

Love, beauty, passion—these are all ideals that high-end audio manufacturers love to espouse as cornerstones of their brands. It’s marketing BS; hardly anyone is really under the impression that black metallic boxes or room-dominating loudspeaker boxes are pure expressions of beauty, right? Making its worldwide debut in the 4400-square-foot Amsterdam room at the PGE Narodowy stadium, the Lampizator Aphrodite DAC challenges that assumption. So do the Clarisys Aria magnetostatic ribbon speakers, which were also demonstrated here.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

We’ve discovered that, when we come to Warsaw to cover the annual Audio Video Show, we must always spend our first day at the stadium location, PGE Narodowy. It’s just too busy there on the weekend. This year, we were expecting to be impressed with the new large exhibition rooms that have been added to the venue. When I looked in the London room shared by Spanish speaker maker Lorenzo Audio Labs and its local distributor ZenSati, I saw a pair of refrigerator-sized loudspeakers trimmed in a natural wood veneer that could only be described as “decadent.” Impressed? Yeah.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

How is it possible for Italian men to be so goddamn graceful? The lilting accent, casually stylish habiliment, as if it’s just natural. I always feel like a shambling oaf when I’m around Italians. So it was on Friday morning at the PGE Narodowy stadium, the site that Diapason chose for the unveiling of its newest speaker, the Didascalìa.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

Over the last few years at Audio Video Show here in Warsaw and at High End in Munich, Canada’s EMM Labs has shared rooms with its distributors, and thus with other manufacturers. At Audio Video Show 2025, EMM Labs was hosting the room, and the equipment rack at the front was filled with a collection of components that appeared to have been freshly unloaded from the Death Star.

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Category: Audio Video Show 2025

Varso Place is a skyscraper in Warsaw overlooking the Warszawa Centralna railway station and the historic Palace of Culture and Science. Standing 310 meters tall, Varso is the tallest building in Poland. In fact, it’s the tallest building in Europe outside of Russia, beating the Shard in London by a handful of inches. If I crane my neck, I can just barely make out its silhouette through the October fog from my hotel room window.

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Category: Jason Thorpe

Over the past two years, I’ve written about several products from Crystal Cable and Siltech. Crystal Cable’s Art Series Monet speaker cables and Diamond Series phono cable impressed me greatly. Back in the spring of 2024, I hopped a plane to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to visit the Monarch Systems Distribution folks for their unveiling of the Master Crown series of cables from Siltech.

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Category: BloggingOnAudio

A trip to Austria was part of my destiny. I’ve been spinning records since my early teen years, keeping the vinyl faith right through the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine. I’ve emerged into a world where I have the opportunity to spend a big chunk of my time spinning records and writing about analog playback.

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Category: Roger Kanno

Jason Thorpe and Thom Moon have been writing about vinyl systems for the SoundStage! Network for many years, albeit from opposite ends of the price spectrum. You may have also seen our Why Vinyl series on the Soundstage! YouTube channel and read articles by Doug Schneider, Dennis Burger, and Gordon Brockhouse about their experiences with vinyl playback in their own systems. And while I’ve watched all those videos and read all those articles, it wasn’t until I read Thom’s glowing review of the Technics SL‑100C turntable on SoundStage! Access that I decided to upgrade my system’s analog front end to better listen to my growing vinyl collection.

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Category: Jason Thorpe

Rob was living in a gilded, golden age. His stereo had been uncharacteristically stable for several months. The Kinki Studio EX-M1+ integrated amplifier was being fed by Ron’s Meridian DAC, while driving my own Focus Audio FP60 BE speakers. Those large bookshelf speakers were augmented with a pair of SVS SB‑2000 Pro subwoofers, providing Rob with essentially limitless bass to complement the rich, pure, and refined sound generated by the core system.

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Category: Jonathan Gorse

There are few audio products that are truly revolutionary, that can legitimately claim to have redefined the state of the art. These include Edgar Villchur’s Acoustic Research AR-1 (1954), the first-ever acoustic-suspension loudspeaker; the Quad ESL (1957), the world’s first commercial full-range electrostatic loudspeaker; the original AR turntable (1961), also designed by Villchur, which established the template for every sprung-subchassis turntable that followed; the Technics SP-10 (1970), the world’s first direct-drive turntable; the BBC LS3/5A monitor (1975); and the Philips CD100 and Sony CDP-101 (1982) CD players, which ushered in the digital era. I believe another product belongs on this list: the Townshend Rock turntable (1982).

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Category: High End 2025

“Find Kroma Atelier. I think they’re upstairs somewhere,” Doug Schneider told me. The MOC is huge, and there are a gazillion exhibitors. I didn’t find them under “C” in the directory, so I told Doug I wasn’t having any luck.

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Category: High End 2025

Conspicuous “CAD” logos filled the front door of Computer Audio Design’s exhibit at High End 2025. What is this? I wondered. Computer-aided design has been used for decades in hi-fi products. Could this be a system designed by a computer? Was I about to hear a system designed by AI?

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Category: High End 2025

As SoundStage! Ultra senior editor Jason Thorpe and I wandered the halls and atria of the Munich Order Center on Saturday morning, we decided to stop for a brief rest near the entrance of the building. As we lounged on a white-cushioned bench, we looked up, almost in unison, at the conspicuous 12-foot-tall poster directly in front of us. It urged us to head to the Auer Acoustics room and see the company’s new speakers.

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Category: High End 2025

When I heard that JBL would be debuting a line of new speakers here at High End 2025, I was half-thinking I’d be checking out some tablet-shaped Bluetooth speaker blasting Taylor Swift, because there’s a lot of this stuff sold under the JBL brand.

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Category: High End 2025

Please cast your mind back to last year’s High End, where I related the peak experience of listening to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” on PMC’s huge, powerful roller coaster of a system. It was the most intense audio-related experience of my life.

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