Part 5 — Lower Level, And Left (Outremont / St. Laurent Rooms) At The Montreal Audiofest 2026 Show
Major demos, new high-end audio tech, and very interesting audiophile innovation.
Montreal Audiofest Show Report By Rick Becker

St. Laurent Rooms

S1, S2  Earvana And Marketplace
To keep the room numbers sequential, I tracked back down to the far end of this hallway to cover the St. Laurent rooms on the opposite side. S1 and S2 were combined, creating one big room for both Earvana and the Marketplace. It was generally busy on several occasions I visited this space.

Not every booth was readily identifiable as a particular vendor or manufacturer, but I tried to capture photos of every booth.

This guy was appropriately delivering pizza to sustain the staff at the Princess Pasta Audio booth.

Princess Pasta Audio has been appearing at the Canadian shows for over a year now and seems to be thriving.

The Princess Pasta Audio space was a lot more organized at this show.

Gerr Audio markets test and measurement equipment for the audio and communications industry.

Norm Varney of AV Room Service sells products and advice for treating acoustic problems in rooms, often making on-site visits to solve acoustic problems. They aggressively market themselves at Canadian and U.S. shows.

Montreal is the hometown of Charles Kirmuss, Doctor of Groove, so his presence here is quite natural. He markets his LP restoration products and cavitation record cleaning machine around the world. Charles is always very generous with his time with people who want to know more about cleaning their LPs, and there is a lot to be learned from studying his website.

Montreal, like Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Toronto, and others, is large enough to sustain an active audiophile society. They have a table to recruit new members at the show every year.

I had praised the electrostatic speaker from Soltanus Acoustics in Serbia at a previous show in Montreal, and they have been doing even better with their electrostatic headphones and amplifier.

The presenter recognized me from the previous show and insisted I take a listen to their headphone/amplifier combination. As I've said many times, I'm not a headphone geek, but I was very impressed with the sound quality of these high-end headphones. The headphones were $6500, and the headphone amp with a tube preamp was another $6500.

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