AXPONA 2024 Day 3 Video Coverage
almost an hour's worth
AXPONA 2024 hosted 10,391 attendees from 42 states and 31 countries at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center April 12-14, 2024— 14% increase over 2023. It was the best attended AXPONA yet.
As with 2023's strong vinyl sales, the doom and gloom crowd was again wrong. This is a vital and growing hobby that has something affordable for every music lover but aside from shopping at a price point, there's so much fun looking at and listening to the cost is no object audio gear if just to get a reality check about what's possible.
Big rooms featuring Wilson Audio, Sonus Faber, Acora Acoustics and Clarisys showed what audio reproduction can sound like on a grand scale, while smaller rooms filled with more affordable gear let attendees hear products scaled down in price and size.
Many room achieved extremely good sound but I do not award prizes for best sound or even get involved in judging hotel room sound. It's really not fair and other than self-aggrandizement I don't think it serves a useful function. I heard bad sound from too many products I know sound good. When the room acoustics are poor and the electricity is worse, what's the point of setting up a competition?
That said, Jeff Joseph and Nick Doshi carried out one of the more interesting experiments, recording a jazz group late afternoon Saturday on a stage set up in their Nirvana room space. They had two mic set ups and on Sunday played both. One sounded remarkably similar to the live performance. I believe it was the Blumlein mic array.
The show featured 202 dedicated listening rooms on 12 floors and included a busy "Ear Gear Experience" headphone and personal audio section and the Expo Hall that included new and used record vendors and accessory and cable sellers as well as a "Master Class Theater" where speakers sounded off on a variety of seriously interesting topics.
This was a great show with an international flavor at which numerous new products made their American debuts and a few their world debuts, though many more such introductions can be expected at Munich High End May 9th-12th.
This video is the third and final TrackingAngle AXPONA video. You'll see new cartridges, turntables, phono preamps and other analog-related products and finally I think I got the sound sorted out with the RODE GOII properly paired with the 4K DJI Pocket3 camera. Enjoy!
