Axpona

I agree with Ohlala that the Bricasti room was impressive. For me the system I would taken home was in the Mofi.com room, Quad/BAT, though the MBL room was a close second.

My daughter ended up sitting next to a TAS rep in the Magico room (4th floor I think) and after the demo she said his notes were something to the effect of "dynamic but lacking emotion". I just thought it was an odd track for a demo, three piece jazz but all very closely mic'd so the while the instrumentation was lively the mix was somewhat unnatural.

The Esoteric room was awful, in my humble opinion. To the point that I wondered if the left La Sphere speaker had a blown tweeter or something. It shrieked at me most unpleasantly. And I like a forward high end.

The Sadurni horns were cool, but I didn't get an extremely satisfying answer from the rep about why they chose to pair them with Merrill mono blocks. Something to the effect of "while these are 108Db efficient and could run on flea watts we chose to run them with these 400W Veritas...". IDK, seemed odd.

In the Scaena room there was a Crown amp peeking out from under the curtain in the back of the room. The rep confirmed that it was running the subs. So put it out in the open! Don't be ashamed of your Crown amp!

Kudos to the guys in the Benchmark room for just being super cool and fun to talk to.

Merrill Wettasinghe was kind enough to respond to me and provide clarification on the pairing of the VERITAS amps and the horns. He graciously allowed me to post his reply, which is included in part below.

"The VERITAS was partnered with the Horns due to the sonic qualities of the horns that were dicovered accidently by the Sadurni during a city shutdown because of a snow storm. In the listening sessions, The VERITAS Monoblocks were toyingly and reluctantly replacing a high end Tube amp. Much to everyones surprise, and to the surprise of Sadurni also, it was better. I was not in that listening session and was called later to listen it them which I reluctantly did as I care much for the horn sound. I was surprised also at the sound from the horns which has no horn sound but all the dynamics and punch.
Here is the reviewer's write up.
http://dagogo.com/sadurni-acoustics-staccato-speakers-review-part-ii-the-sound/2"

BG