The AXPONA 2023 Chronicles: Part 6
Premium audio sound systems on the 7th floor.
Audio Expo North America 2023 Show Report By Rick Becker

Nexus Audio Technologies, ANTICABLES, 432 Evo, Alta Audio, And Primare
Alta Audio's Adam floorstanding speakers were sounding good driven by a rig comprised mostly of Primare electronics from Sweden. The Adams are $17k in black and $18k in wood finishes. Cables were by Anticables, a modest to moderately priced brand.

Primare was running their Pre 35 preamp ($5k) with their DD 34 CD transport feeding a 432 EVO Reference Music Server from Belgium. The power amp was the 35.8 eight-channel amp ($5500) that can be bridged to serve as a two-channel amp putting out 750 Watts per channel. Coming in the fall is the SP 25 Prisma home cinema processor that will mate with the 35.8 amp.

KMD Engineering Co. Ltd. And Orchestalls
This was my second visit with the Orchestalls speakers and I must say I was very impressed with the sound here. KMD, a South Korean company, started out manufacturing disposable medical devices, then added mushroom production engineering, and most recently they seem to have mastered high-end speaker manufacturing.

Looking like it was designed with artificial intelligence, the sound quality belied the fact that the speakers were driven by a Vincent SV-237 hybrid integrated amp fed from a Yamaha BD-A1060 Blu-ray disk player — hence the orchestra on the video screen.

Perhaps it was the power of the video image that made it sound so good? No fancy footers under this gear either. Next time, I'll check closely to see if the polished box to the left of the left speaker was a power conditioner or an external crossover.

If your room isn't wide enough for the big guys in the rig, they showed a couple of smaller models off to the side. In any case, I suspect the speakers do not come fully assembled, so I hope installation at your site is included. It looks like more than a one-person task. If they could replace the baffles with a solid surface material and lose the Allen-head machine screws, it would clean up the overall appearance. Nevertheless, this was a surprisingly good presentation that has me thinking my next component may be a large-screen TV to watch concert videos on YouTube.

AV Luxury Group International, Grimm Audio, And WestminsterLab
Luxury Group International took three rooms in a row as they have done in past years. They had an equipment list in the first room, which had the loudspeaker mislabeled, so I don't know how accurate my info is about their rooms. The Raidho Acoustics website introduces new models, perhaps to be introduced at Munich, which show a slightly different front baffle. I would expect the new models to sound slightly better, but only in direct comparison with the previous series.

The speakers were Raidho TD 2.2, from Denmark, which sounded very good as you would expect from this brand. At the front end, the room sheet listed an Aurender N30SA server ($25k) running to a Berkeley Audio Design Alpha Reference DAC 3 ($28k). The cabling was a mix of Shunyata Omege, RX Technology, and WestminsterLab Ultra cables.

The preamp was a WestminsterLab Quest balanced preamp ($25,100) shown above with a Plexiglas top. The front of the unit is at the lower edge of the photo. Note the use of carbon fiber shielding upgrades in various parts of the interior.

Finally, they had the WestminsterLab Rei monoblocks ($32,900) sitting on a custom Falken'Ohr Rei amp stand ($6k), both of which I had seen earlier at the show. The amp didn't seem the least bit taxed with the music being played.

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