The AXPONA 2023 Chronicles: Part 10
Third floor thrills with great sounding stereo systems.
Audio Expo North America 2023 Show Report By Rick Becker

Shunyata Research And Clarisys
Shunyata Research's room seems to have garnered more interest due to the Clarisys ribbon / electrostatic speakers that premiered here than their own flagship Omega speaker cable.

Those were Constellation Audio preamp and stereo power amp on the Stillpoints rack on the left. The small box with all the power cords was the Shunyata Altaira. And the hose in the lower right quadrant of the photo with the wheels was their new speaker cable which I had just seen at the Montreal show. A Shunyata Everest power conditioner was rising between the Stillpoints racks.

The fit and finish of the Clarisys Minuet speakers ($38,800/pair), a combination of ribbon and electrostatic designs was as superb as the music coming from it. While it is reminiscent of Jason Bloom's Apogee full-range ribbon speaker that was notoriously difficult to drive with its 1 Ohm minimum impedance, this speaker here was said to be much easier to drive — not that the Constellation amp is any slouch.

It looks like they had a second Altaira power conditioner for the digital gear that included an Aurender server, the new Pink Faun 2.16 Ultra streamer, and a dCS DAC and clock.

Danville Signal Processing
This was a room a lot of people probably skipped.

I've mentioned this speaker in the past as it is available in kit form. The name escapes me at the moment. The woofer assembly is the design used by Linkwitz and it seems to work very well in both products.

This is Al Clark who explained to me the services offered by Danville Signal to other manufacturers. Their website puts it this way:

"Danville designs and manufactures electronic products using a blend of digital signal processing (DSP) and analog circuit technology to create solutions for high-performance professional and consumer audio markets."

They were at the show primarily to gain exposure to other manufacturers.

SOTA
SOTA had a pair of turntables running into tube electronics that were driving a pair of stand-mounted KEF Reference 1 speakers supplemented with a pair of REL S510 subwoofers.  This was a rare opportunity to hear REL subwoofers of any kind at a show.

The turntable shown here was the Quasar model with a walnut finish and equipped with their RoadRunner ($3520). It was equipped with a Rega RB 880 tonearm ($1235) and had a Grado Master Reference cartridge mounted ($1500) for a total cost of $6345. The RoadRunner is a speed read-out that reads a magnet attached to the bottom of the platter.

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