AXPONA 2022
After a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Audio Expo North America, better known as AXPONA, is back. Audio trade shows were gone for so long that they felt like a product of a bygone era, especially with the end of the venerable Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. However, with this year’s resumption of the Florida Audio Expo, Montreal Audio Fest, and now AXPONA, it looks as if the trade show element of the audio hobby is back, and not a moment too soon. While hi-fi audio is a relatively solitary hobby, it is always good to socialize with like-minded enthusiasts face-to-face once in a while, and trade shows are a great outlet toward that end. With the return of so many familiar brands and faces and with such a smooth and successful show, AXPONA resumed as though there had never been such a lengthy interruption.
This year’s show featured a lot of interesting new products, and it showed what many of these audio companies were busy concocting while they were isolated in their laboratories for these last couple of years. They have not been idle, and there were a lot of very impressive and innovative products on display. In fact, there was so much cool stuff that we can’t cover everything, so in this report, we will just look at some highlights that grabbed our attention.
Loudspeakers @ AXPONA 2022 Youtube Discussion
JBL’s room sounded great, which is not surprising since they have been such a reliably good loudspeaker manufacturer for so many years now. In their room were a pair of HDI-3600s ($4.2k/pair) which are a step smaller sibling to the terrific HDI-3800s that we reviewed a little while ago. One intriguing little speaker that they had running was the new L52 Classics, which looked like baby L100 Classics, another speaker we reviewed not that long ago. The L52 Classic ($1k/pair) is a two-way design using a ¾” titanium dome tweeter and a 5 ¼” pulp cone woofer. It shares many of the same design cues from the L100 Classic, including the retro grille. Because of this, we expect it to be a very competent speaker and a great solution for those who like the sound and style of the L100 Classics but can not handle their size or $4.2k/pair pricing. This is a speaker that could see a review in the future here at Audioholics, so stay tuned for much deeper coverage on the L52 Classics!
I reviewed the Perlisten Audio S7ts about a year ago, and they remain one of the best all-around loudspeakers that I have encountered as a reviewer. So it was nice to reunite with them in Perlisten’s room at AXPONA. They still had the same combination of power and accuracy that has since helped Perlisten make a name for itself as a brand in a relatively short time. Our coverage of the S7ts has been extensive in both print and video, so I won’t go on about them here, but Perlisten brought a sample of a new in-wall series they are developing based on the Signature series. The in-wall that I saw uses the same driver outlay as the S4b speaker that I reviewed late last year and essentially puts that speaker into an in-wall form factor. One thing that surprised me about this in-wall, called the 4i LCRS, was how heavy-duty the backbox was for it, although perhaps I should not have been so surprised given the build quality in all the Perlisten products I have seen so far. The entire speaker had a thick aluminum housing and had the most robust build quality for an in-wall speaker that I have ever seen. It was seriously heavy at 24 lbs. Perlisten plans to bring in-wall speaker variants of free-standing speakers from the Signature line, and presumably, they will all have this level of build. There are a lot of high-cost in-walls whose prices do not seem justified, but the Perlisten in-walls are certainly not among those.
James Larson is Audioholics’ primary loudspeaker and subwoofer reviewer on account of his deep knowledge of loudspeaker functioning and performance and also his overall enthusiasm toward moving the state of audio science forward.
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