AXPONA Chicago 2016 Show Report

[Ducatista47]

If anyone is interested, I will post a few highlights (for me) of the AXPONA audio show in Chicago. My fourth consecutive year in attendance with my audio buddy Dave, we were there for the full three days this time. Previously, we had viewed two days once and a single day twice. We still didn’t hear everything, but were able to catch almost everything of interest to us and heard some great live music. I will split this into two parts; skip to the second if you are only interested in the rooms.

My purchases were mostly music CDs. Four more MA Recordings titles and a TBM (Three Blind Mice) XRCD from right across the aisle at Elusive Disc. The TBM is from 1976, The Big Four by George Kawaguchi’s Big Four group. A really nice Jazz outfit. George was a drummer and his solos are worth the wait. Not the usual Rock or strictly Jazz solos.

The other CDs were bought from musicians at their performances. A number of concerts are sponsored by exhibitors at the show. This year we had to miss the Friday night show by the Akiko Tsuruga Jazz Trio, a B3 artist. I was at another hotel that night and was too tired to drive again safely. Dave did not want to audition my ancient stick shift Jetta TDI in Chicago at night, so we missed it. Saturday night a cable company who had entered the guitar cable market, Morrow Audio, brought in Larry Mitchell. He played solo with his “band” represented electronically. He plays his songs with a dose of reverb and sometimes tremolo and doesn’t really need a band. He was so much fun to listen to and he was very funny as well. The venue was a good sized meeting room which served hot lunches during the day. We were the sober ones in the room, as the Morrow Audio promoter had a bar there and handed out free drink tickets – and kept handing them out, despite the publicity saying there would be free drink tickets for the first 60 arrivals. I didn’t feel like a drink and Dave is an AA. Larry’s music was plenty entertaining without drug help, no problem. I purchased Mitchell’s newest CD, The Traveler. I like to support live music and musicians directly by attending and buying their music directly from them when possible. Since he is a one man operation he got the whole fifteen dollars and I got to feel good about it.

From there it was across the hall, literally, to the theater, a good room with theater seating and decent acoustics. We approached the entrance and saw signs about tickets. Crap! We had forgotten about tickets, which were available free from the sponsors of the event but we forgot to pick them up at the exhibits. A nice girl was standing at the entrance, held out tickets for us and welcomed us to the concert. Only a few famous appearances at this show have ever charged admission (Patricia Barber was one). Buy an admission to AXPONA and you won’t be paying to see anything, be it music or demonstrations.

This was the featured concert, Chicago Blues Night. The Noah Wotherspoon Band opened and Lurrie Bell’s Chicago Blues Band finished. Chad of Acoustic Sounds (original and remastered vinyl and CDs – they do a lot of the remastered titles for other companies as well) put it on and introduced it. I had not heard of Wotherspoon before but he was every bit as spectacularly good as Bell and his band. I purchased Noah’s latest CD as I left.

Sunday afternoon was the “Student Day Concert” – students get reduced admission on the last day – presenting Catfight. Not the wimpy recorded duo, rather a (proudly) cover band from Chicago, like most cover bands unrecorded. Catfight was the most fun show I have seen from a band in a long, long time. A female five piece covering Eighties songs mostly not known to me. In my world the Eighties started with The Pretenders in 1979 and ended when Bikini Kill started in 1991. I missed the hit radio fare the whole decade. In any case, from their six foot (plus?) singer who was buff and very active to all the accomplished musicians, this is a first class outfit. Meaning as good as anyone making more money than they do. If you like bands who try to entertain you in both musical and non musical ways, see Catfight. Like all Sunday afternoon concerts at AXPONA, attendance was very poor. The theater had been full for the Blues concert but was maybe 5 percent this show. A couple of years ago we were half of the four people that stuck it out to the second set of the Neil Alger Trio, a World class Jazz group. I told the Catfight bass player not to feel bad; that’s how the Sunday concerts roll there. They played their hearts out anyway.

My non music purchases were limited to two venders at the Ear Gear Expo, the big room stuffed with private and portable listening companies. Firstly, Comply, the people who sell memory foam tips for IEMs. Unless you actually feel comfortable wearing the three flange tips that the best IEM providers offer, just use Comply tips like everyone else does. Their Professional Series tips are the most hifi and cost LESS than their other lines. Nice thing about buying at shows, no shipping. And half off a second package. Lots of vendors have one version or another of a show price.

I am taking a chance on the other purchase, a CALYX PaT. The US distributor was there and offered a show price of $75. Sold everywhere else for $99. It is a TINY DAC/amp for phones and players that uses OTG technology to extract the digital signal from the player and offers upgraded sound. While working for Android, it was designed with iOS in mind but Apple has never made an OTG cable or adapter for the IPod Touch. I am gambling that the one device I know of, a third party piece sold in Australia, will work. If this is Greek to you, On The Go wiring for audio is similar if not identical to what docks have. Power/sync cables do not do this. I use IPod Touch players (with Rhapsody) for all my portable listening and their amplification is considered their weak spot. People like to gripe about the DAC in them too, but I imagine it is probably fine. IMO they do offer the most convenient streaming experience out there, so I stick with them. The CALYX PaT can put out 800mV so it can power efficient headphones too. It does sound great. The unit draws power from the player but usually no more than the player’s own amp would use. If the cable doesn’t work for me I can sell the CALYX to any iPhone user who listens to music on it.

[Ducatista47]

OK, on to some impressions. The Ear Gear Expo was very well attended; it is after all the growth segment of audio these days. In the back corner there was a good demo setup by HeadAmp. It was very discouraging to see that hardly anyone was stopping there. They have the World’s best headphone system you can buy, at least if you note that the new Sennheiser Orpheus is $55K and already sold out. There was the best Stax headphone and the best electrostatic amp there is, and not even tire kickers. Oh well, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, as they say.

I liked the CALYX PaT, but I covered it elsewhere. The room was full of gear for private listening and there was a lot for anyone to try. Electronics, IEMs, headphones, a hog in heaven class experience. Most booths were manned by the designers and owners.

One headphone startup had something truly different on offer. The Taction Kannon closed-back headset is an over the ear with a second transducer in each channel that renders 15-200Hz that you feel as well as hear. Its active element is a metal plate. The neo driver plays to 30kHz and covers the Taction range too. The sound from the 40mm neo dynamic driver was fine, but it is a work in progress and will improve. If this sounds like a gimmick, don’t believe it. It works. You are wearing headphones and you can feel the bass, like from a subwoofer or at a concert. It can’t flutter your clothes but the experience is very similar. Each earcup has a little rotary control to adjust the Taction output. The amps are in the earcups. It is a crowd funded effort and if you donate you can get the product at a considerable discount when it reaches production. The guys are very cool and we shared stories of playing in bands. If you want to, Google “kannon kickstarter”.

Industry giant Shure has ended a five year design effort and is releasing a portable electrostatic IEM-amp setup. It sounds great and had parametric EQ for those who prefer monitoring or basshead applications, or have tricky hearing. The bad news, $3000. It is expensive to make a quality electrostatic amp and that is the lion’s share of the cost here.

HeadAmp makes a nice player, I didn’t know that, and it uses two 9 volt batteries instead of the usual AA or AAA. I would say the 18V helps, and battery life is to die for. HeadAmp’s Peter James showed me the rechargeable 9Vs he uses. I like this approach better than internal batteries that die and need to be replaced with player surgery.

Since I went on last year about the MBL room, I will start there. Last year the top of the middle range Noble Line was there. This year they bagged a large room so they brought, for only the second time in the US since they reorganized the North American market after the 2009 corporate sale, their big rig. The square room shape was tamed by huge wood diffuser/absorbers on the sides. They were on casters and must have cost what my house did. The omnidirectional speakers dictated that side reflections should be controlled. The Reference Line Radialstrahler MBL 101 X-treme is a beast. I will say right away that it did less of that otherworldly you are at the venue soundstage presentation than the Noble did last year; the square room was not the golden ratio, quite the opposite, and the big speakers were fighting it. What they did do was offer an unheard of combination of everything you want in a speaker. Direct driver dynamics as good as the best horn systems. Every last nuance of timbre. No quality of the music was weak, underplayed or out of balance. Enormous power available, and used when needed. Omnidirectional, of course.

A beast, I said. Two units to each speaker, seven hundred pounds each. Right, fourteen hundred pounds per channel. The power was from four monoblocks, MBL 9011s, I seem to remember 285 (265?) pounds each. And they are huge. They don’t have faceplates. The entire amp is cased in sections of thick faceplate worthy material, attached with serious allen bolts. One look and I was thinking pallet jacks. The electronics were all MBL, all the equal of say Burmeister or whatever you have. When the show ended and the crews started rolling in the crates, I was not sure one semi would hold it all.

What this all means to you and I is discouraging. People with a lot of money can do better than we can. How much money? MBL 101 X-treme speakers, $263,000 to $271,000 a pair (color choices). The monoblocks, $53,000 each. With the CD player, the DAC and the preamp, $558,200. The room in total, with cables, probably treatment, and such, about $700,000. And how much better? Only the Kingsound electrostatics, of anything I have ever heard, topped them in any department, and that was absolute resolving power, and not by much. I did hear the Everest IIs this show, in a decent sized room this time, but I had heard the MBLs first. They sounded polite by comparison to the German giants. Likewise the Revels. At this pricepoint one would think half a million would not get you much more than sixty-five thousand, and that is often the case, but not this time. I might have been impressed by the JBLs if I had heard them first, but MBL ruined every other speaker in the show for me. I did not speak with Jeremy Bryan, who is President & CEO of MBL North America, but I spoke at length with one of his assistants, a lady from New York City. She said that the area where they are based, around Boynton Beach, Florida, had a lot of people who could afford these. There is a market.

At the end of the show vendors and famous recording types came by. I have never before been in a room full of the luminaries of the recording and audio gear industries, never mind a roomful where none of them were talking and all were listening. This was their chance, they can’t afford this stuff either. MBL put on a show for them instead of tearing down right away. They were playing a reel to reel tape they had made. An engineer remastered master tapes of many recordings, from Lisa Gerrard’s The Black Opal to Bob Marley. He made them a mix tape of the project for the show. All the individual albums will be released at some point. One of the front and center seat listeners, the big chair. was the engineer who did the remasters.

I have saved the controversial blockbuster for last. Every wristband worn at the show had “Synergistic Research Room 529” molded on it. The last few hours of the show we explored the upper floors of the expo and the very last thing we did was stumble into the door of room 529. We had forgotten all about it and it was literally the closest room. Some vendors were already packing up but these folks were giving a last demonstration as we walked in and sat down. The man already sitting wanted only the short presentation; when he left they offered to give the two of us the full demo. The last event at the show, and we were astounded and so lucky to have been led there. Pure serendipity. Bear with me, even describing this means a lot of words, but you may want to stick this out.

This company does other things too, but this was about listening in a space. When we were done he asked us to communicate to others not present, like I am now, about what we had heard, because online and in print listeners do not believe any of this could possibly work at all, never mind the spectacular results it actually gets, results that we heard. We had no idea what this company did or sold when we walked in, but we saw a standard stereo setup in a small hotel room, like so many others at the show. Two column floorstanders of modest size, light was low but I took them to be Sonys, Macintosh amps, digital source controlled from an iPad. The sound was spectacular. It didn’t sound like a hotel room, rather like the DEQX setup I heard three years ago in a Newform Research room, but way beyond that. It made that little stereo sound like the best stereo at the show. It didn’t have the finesse of the MBLs but sounded better than anything else, JBL included. (If this proves nothing else, a good stereo in a perfect room beats a great stereo in a normal room every time.) Clarity and impact to die for. It rivaled the omnidirectional Radialstrahlers in the handling of acoustic space. So we had an idea that this was about room treatment. Looking around, there were 12 (there was a thirteenth behind the banner on the back wall) small insubstantial panels, maybe ten by sixteen, little black picture type frames holding what looked like speaker cloth or scotchbrite, along the walls and corners, mostly at standing head height. There was a tall, narrow column in front of the rack topped by a tiny cube, and in front of it on the floor a box like thing perhaps eight by eight by six inches (to guess). I didn’t see until he later pointed them out a grid of inch or so round disks on the ceiling. I also missed the tiny, tiny dots on the speakers.

As I said, the sound was uber, best ever. He took the mystery box on the floor and removed it from the room entirely. Took it outside pretty much. A lot of the magic went with it. As it was not connected to anything and had occupied less space than a loaf of bread, this was mysterious. Then he took the tiny cube from atop the column and put it in a drawer. The sound became even more ordinary. Then they removed the panels and took them out of the room. More loss of magic. Then he turned off an electronic unit that was located either in the column to on the rack, I don’t remember. Ditto effect on sound. I looked at him and said, certainly not the first to do so, “How did you do that?”

He explained at length that there were a few things going on, and explained them all, but the gist was that the mysterious physical elements were being excited by both sound and radio waves. They were passive in the “it’s not plugged in” way, but they were being excited by the audio and radio waves. There was resonating going on. The radio waves are I guess instructions. I can't remember. He then put everything back and walked over to the speakers while they were again playing and started moving the tiny dots. There appeared to be at least two kinds and every time he moved one, either from the top to the side or along the baffle, it changed something about the sound. Not like in the usual bullshit isolating feet demo but really changed it. It also happened when he would take one kind of dot and put one of the other kind on top of it.


I am going to research the website, he had no literature but said between the writing and the links the website had a lot of information. Much of my speculation and interpretation of what he told us will no doubt prove to be ignorant, and I look forward to the corrections. But he did another demonstration that well described what the system does. After removing all the panels again, they (he had help) replaced them one zone at a time. You have to realize that unlike other room treatments, this does not progressively deaden the room to certain vibrations. Turn it off and turn it on and nothing get quieter. It creates zones where the room is fixed and everything sounds like the perfect space. As the panels went on the back wall the sound that seemed to be coming from there was fixed. Then the side walls by the stereo. Ditto. Then the back of the room where we were sitting. It was like turning lights on progressively in a room, but instead you were turning on the sound quality. This does not resemble, in any way, anything I have experienced. Just take this away. It really works, it works better than any room treatment or electronics I have ever heard and probably any you may have ever heard, and while I didn’t check it is probably not cheap. Maybe factoring in not using any other treatments, not so much. I know DEQX is not cheap.


I forgot to mention that his tablet could tell the system to invoke different rooms at a touch. I asked how it would handle rooms of difficult shape, I was thinking of my living-dining room dog leg shape with both up and down stairs to boot, and he said rooms shapes do not matter AT ALL to this approach.

[srm51555]

Thanks for sharing! I had no clue about AXPONA. Hopefully I'll remember for next years show so I can attend.

[Mr. Widget]

Thanks for the very thorough and detailed write up on your show experience.

Regarding your listening impressions and the second post, I found this most interesting (all of it) especially coming from a proponent of the DiffMaker. I am not singling you out but thinking of us (we human beings) as the incredibly complex machines that we are. I must say that my take is that our preconceived notions, visual perception, and the very "vibe in the room" are all extremely damned difficult to isolate and remove these external biases from our listening experience.

I am not questioning your conclusions, but am questioning our ability to be objective... no matter how hard we may try.

I have my own experiences with a number of the items you mentioned and will add my opinions and observations when I have time to return. I really enjoyed reading about yours.


Widget

[Ducatista47]

Thanks, Widget. When I wrote this I couldn't imagine any result except boredom and an occasional raised eyebrow. I do want to mention that both Dave and I are old hands at sniffing out audio and sales tomfoolery and nitwittery. The first precaution is built in at this point. We prefer different things. He is a tube and vinyl guy and I am a JFET-MOSFET and digital-CD proponent. I love a lot of music from the last twenty years and he, while eighteen years younger, considers it a wasteland. He has money and I do not, so in practical terms we tend to gravitate to different gear that way as well. We are both capable of non critical listening, our usual mode, but at shows and whenever confronted with sales force or unfamiliar products we become skeptics. The more we love it, the harder we look, so we are more demonstration proof than most.

In so many words, we tend to spot different things in the same gear. We tend to have it covered like a blanket. After spending a lot of time with the MBLs we did very much like other speakers, but their shortcomings were easy to spot, as always. Nothing is perfect and our enjoyment of gear is not ruined by variation and imperfection. But - MBL is the rare time in audio when more money does get you closer to perfect than less money. No big shiny red horns, no physics be damned cable, no audio review fairy descriptions. Just fewer compromises because the boxcar of money was spent well instead of on cosmetic or creative persuasion. (The speakers do look striking, however. The main drivers are form follows function but did end up looking like science fiction - and a mashup of Bauhaus aesthetic and steampunk. And of course huge. The monoblocks looked like something from the engine room of an alien spacecraft or a secret government installation. Industrial, dark and sinister.) I really, really looked for weaknesses. Price was about it, and that was understandable. It is nice to find stuff like this even when you could not possibly afford it. At least that's how we both feel. That obviously wasn't the case in the Ear Gear Expo crowd that mobbed almost everything else but avoided the best hardware in the room because they couldn't afford it and it was not the flavor of the week, well covered by adds and reviews in things they read and watch.

The Synergistic Research room and demo set our skeptical sides into overdrive. We certainly heard it all but believed it to be somehow a typical sales demo that was, well a sales demo, with the deck pre stacked in every artful way that could be brought to bear. So we double teamed it when re re-ran everything again after I asked how he did it. While I would close my eyes for long periods and not look at what he was doing, Dave watched him like a hawk. He did not pull any tricks or suspicious inputs with his tablet. He never adjusted the room or the rig in any way he did not tell us about before he did it.

What made me really attentive to what he told us after my question was what did not happen before it. He told us nothing about why he was doing what he was doing until he had demonstrated the sonic results. Not even what his stuff did or was supposed to do. We heard it all before he said a word besides telling us that he was going to move something, ie "I am going to take this out of the room". No expectation bias introduced by description, that was a new one on me. He didn't even tell us what the company did until I asked how did he do what I heard, and come to think about it not even then. When he ran it again he told us what would change when and it matched what we had heard when he had said nothing, and we never described what we thought we heard. The entire time I only spoke three times that I can remember. "How did you do that", "What about difficult room shapes" and "Thank you." I don't remember Dave speaking at all, except whispering to me while the man was out of the room that he had spotted nothing with the tablet. And remember, the only thing we knew about that room before we went in was "Synergistic Research Room 529", and the first thing we noticed was how fantastic the music sounded inside.

As for the probability that while they started with a very small and crappy sounding hotel room a client could never set it up as well as they did, I see from customer comments on reviews that their post sale support is excellent.

[Ducatista47]

Here is one element of the Synergetic Research setup we heard. I know the company is not BS free, see the quote below, but the Room Correction stuff was impressive. Edit: I have listed another and Ian has located a third, below.

"At Synergistic Research we focus on a total system approach to create synergy in your system. All aspects of performance are taken into account and because there is more to synergy than just cables, we've developed some of the world's most innovative solutions like our PowerCell line conditioners and Acoustic ART room treatments and MiG resonance control footers. Of course audio cable and power cords are one of the biggest contributors to system performance second only to room acoustics so we pioneered several ground breaking technologies like Active Shielding with air dielectrics and custom tunable cables with UEF Tuning Circuits to get you closer to the music than ever before."

http://www.synergisticresearch.com/new-uef-acoustic-panels-and-uef-acoustic-dots/

http://www.stereotimes.com/post/syne...phere-and-atm/

[Ian Mackenzie]

http://www.stereotimes.com/post/syne...rch-black-box/

[Ducatista47]

http://www.stereotimes.com/post/syne...rch-black-box/

Thanks, Ian. That, looking a little different and with no spikes, is like one of the pieces in the system we heard. That is about the size, so it may be functionally identical. It follows the same placement of the piece I saw. Here is the setup page from SR.

http://www.synergisticresearch.com/n...rch-black-box/

The reason they demonstrate it to the public where they can is because in reviews it looks as impossible as the cable BS this same company peddles. If I had read this review I would not have believed a word of it. I have asked the company to supply me with an equipment list of the installation we heard.

[Ian Mackenzie]

Its a passive device designed to become active at typical room modes that mask for example the lower midrange and cause bass bloom and function in a way that it's out of phase at those resonance points so they are largely cancelled as a function of a band pass filter much like a band pass bass reflex enclosure. Because of the small size the moving part may be similar to a small high compliance long throw woofer. In the review they said the object resonated physically so it must absorbe energy in this way to null problem resonances.

[rusty jefferson]

Clark,

This gives me great joy!

Whatever we associate with perceived differences/improvements, or Tomfoolery, from things like amplifiers, cables, or little metal dots placed on speakers, it is easy to prove the reality with a simple controlled randomized double blind or A/B/X test, whether or not something like the AudioDiffmaker software evaluation would show any difference at all. The "proof" is what we 'prove" we hear with listening tests. It's nice to get confirmation on a piece of test equipment, but it doesn't always happen. I don't doubt for a minute you heard differences during the demo. Now you just need to prove it to yourself with the double blind.

[Ducatista47]

While I understand the skepticism about this setup, we were 100% skeptical when we first heard it, we are dealing with a recording studio installation repeated in a hotel room known to be a poor room. I have experienced, in the same hotel, years of identical spaces demonstrating sound equipment. This is not some instance of listening to something that comes with a big buildup and a gimmicked demo. We had never heard of this stuff and were told nothing about it. It was heard, it was uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled piece by piece then reinstalled again. All without any attempt to tell us at any time what it should sound like and no attempt to tell us how it worked until we had heard it again and asked. I am frankly less gullible than 95% of you; I know this from what you write and what you listen to, and what you say about it. You don't have to believe a word I say and I would not have believed any of this if I had read about or been told about it. But I did hear it. Another listener I know well heard it right next to me. With a single exception, no one, no experience, has ever convinced me a cable, a power cord, tubes, vinyl or a lot of other things many of you use ever improved music previously played without the benefit of said gear. (I do not personally consider introducing euphonic distortion an improvement.) The exception, I once did purchase tube gear and a current era TT when I listened to the local audio shop people instead of the equipment. From this I learned the final lesson so far: ignore, tune out, what people say about sound and just listen yourself. If I can't hear a difference I don't buy it because I will not improve anything for me. The audiophiles/listeners who like the equipment as a hobby, that would include easily half of the membership here, inevitably hear with their eyes as well as their ears. That is why double-blind is trusted by such listeners, because it gives a control in the experience and it works. Well, I have never cared what audio equipment looks like and prefer to audition gear, and listen normally, with my eyes closed anyway. And by myself, with no one discussing what they think they heard or indeed talking at all. I was raised by a quality control engineer for Shure Brothers. I learned this stuff from birth.

So I finally witness some snake oil sounding installation, after sixty years of listening, that really works, and no one believes me. I guess there is some justice in that. If you told me about it I wouldn't believe it either.

The takeaway from this is that if you went to a working recording studio where the acoustics were well controlled, listened, then took out all the room treatment, and listened again, you would be surprised to say the least if nothing changed. If you restored the room control and again nothing changed, you would schedule an audiologist appointment. The demo we experienced was done like that. Our skepticism was not in what happened but that a representative of the products did it. There was no question that something significant and obvious happened. Stuff that works works, it is simply unexpected from an industry that has always been expert at lying to us. This company sells a lot of snake oil. But these products were not cables, a conditioner, or a power cord. They are overpriced but that does not alter the functionality. Cars are overpriced but they work. Whew. I hope I am done beating this dead horse. I love animals but prefer them alive.

Addendum: A senior member of this website has told me he thought this was pure fantasy because he had encountered this company a few years ago and was exposed to frightful BS and fairy talk about one of the elements in this demo. I have found out that the presenter at the demo I was at was the president of the firm for probably the last twenty years. As he gave no sales pitch at all, stuck to engineering in his explanation, and had the complete package as it now exists, I can safely assume the experiences were polar opposites and had nothing in common except the name on the room. BTW, the speakers I heard were Magicos.