Part 8: Capital Audiofest 2024 Large Rooms Part 1
Lovely sounds at CAF 2024's large exhibit rooms.
Capital Audiofest 2024 Show Report By Rick Becker

Plazza III   Arion Audio, Merrill Audio, And JPS Labs
Last year I was quite impressed with the Arion Audio room, finding it a big improvement over the previous year when they were in a different room. This year, again, it was quite impressive, once I acclimated myself to the tango music they played. The room was nicely dressed and downsized with the use of black curtains at the entrance and down each side. Plaza III is one of the eight huge rooms at the show. By creating a smaller triangle with the speakers and seats at the far end of the room they achieved much better sound quality than if they had tried to use the entire room with the listeners subjected to more reflected sound.

Two racks with Merrill Audio amplifiers powered the Arion red tower and the black subwoofer stacks. Tom Lyle wrote a World Premiere review of the new Element 110 monoblock amplifiers ($12,500) in the August issue. They put out 150 Watts each @ 8 Ohms and double that into 4 Ohms. The Element 116MX monoblocks are twice the price and put out twice the power. A Chang Lightspeed power conditioner ($800 to $5k) was on the bottom of the middle rack. The red finish on the Arion was eye-catching. I won't venture a guess as to what automobile it emulates, but Woodward Avenue in Detroit comes to mind. The Apollo speaker is notably efficient and capable of producing concert-level volumes. The music flowed with life-like ease in this large room.

The tall Arion Apollo 12 loudspeaker system (Gen-2, $60k) speakers are modular, allowing different heights to suit your room. Being an open baffle design with curved sides to reduce dispersion to the rear, it is necessary to bring these out from the front wall. I noted they were on IsoAcoustics footers. Thankfully, the Dual Pack Woofer Package ($9,600/pr, three pairs shown) was done in an unobtrusive satin black to keep the attention on the red towers. From the sign on the floor, I noted cabling was from Joe Skubinski at JPS Labs in Buffalo, NY, with Superconductor 3 and 4 series cables starting at $1699.

Around the back, you can see the facing open-back 10" woofers in each module, which is their patent-pending design. These can be stacked, as shown, or placed individually around the room as a swarm to minimize standing waves.

Each of the modules contains 3 extended-range AMT drivers in this dipole design. It also appears that the inside of the side walls have diffraction ridges. I'll have to check that more carefully next time. The entire speaker design includes an active digital crossover with room correction that integrates the speaker towers and subwoofers with the room. That was probably the black box seen above the Chang Lightspeed power conditioner.

The rack from Merrill Audio ($12k) is one of the most handsome in the industry, integrating carbon fiber shelves with anodized aluminum. Its elegance arises from the simplicity of the design, unlike much of its competition.

The source components were on a table off to the left side. A VPI Avenger Direct Reference turntable ($36k) was fitted with a Lyra Delos cartridge ($2,195). An Aurender N30SA Music Server ($25k) with an EMM Labs Reference DA2-V2 DAC ($30k) was on the digital side. A Merrill JENS MX phono stage ($22k) and Rose QX line stage ($18.5k) tied the front ends together.

Sometimes you can find some pretty neat stuff on the tables at shows. Here I found Ocean Audio, a cross-platform, easy-to-use, fast, and functional audio editor you can download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Les Davis Audio had a constrained-layer-damping turntable mat and some other analog goodies that I should have checked out more closely. My eyes locked onto the Finley Audio cables, distribution box, and very versatile and adaptable cable lifters that I mention year after year.

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