Taiwan Hi-End Show 2017

The Taiwan Hi-End Show 2017 was held last week and Mono and Stereo has a posted a couple of hundred photos of it on their site.

Also several hundred are posted on Hiendy here and here for starters. Full index of their coverage of the Taiwan Hi-End Show 2017 is here

tl;dr: “If you just multiply the price of any Acapella loudspeaker by three or so, you will know what other speakers they should be compared to out there, performance-wise”

It appears to be a fairly large show but with fewer people than the Hong Kong AV Show held last week.

The Acapella Audio Arts’ room featured their LaCampanella loudspeakers, here with red horns. The LaCampanella speakers come in two versions: this is the $23,000 version at 93 dB efficiency. The LaCampanella speakers do not feature Acapella’s ION (plasma) tweeter and instead are a perfect two-way, with the horn acting as a single-point source covering the all-important 700 Hz to 20k+ Hz range.

These speakers perform much better than others anywhere near this price range [as do all Acapella speakers, as those who visited our CAS exhibit room can attest – many hearing our $55K Acapella “High Cellini” speakers rival and in many aspects beat the $300K speakers elsewhere at the show].

Yes, inflated prices at the top end of the high-end audio market are to blame as the top performers position themselves against each other. But…

If you just multiply the price of any Acapella loudspeaker by three or so, you will know what other speakers they should be compared to out there, performance-wise. This both makes us feel good that we are keeping prices reasonable  [well, you know what I mean] and at the same time frustrated that other brands of speakers are getting so much attention, in large part because of their astronomical prices, and whose sound is inferior, on a price-performance basis, compared to Acapella. [*arghhhhh!*]

[There is also a LaCampanella ‘Alto’ speaker at $48,600 with twice as many woofers (4 woofers on top of the horn as well as the 4 below – i.e. the speaker is twice as tall), a better crossover and a 95 dB efficiency].

 

 

 

 

Hong Kong AV Show 2017

We didn’t get to go, but I have been following the news avidly, trying to understand what is happening in China and Asia as they seem to be leading the high-end audio resurgence that will hopefully soon follow on this side of the world.

The above photo of Audio Note UK at the show is from Mono and Stereo’s Hong Kong AV 2017 report

There are also many photos on Audio Shark of the HK AV Show 2017. See also Page 3 for more photos.

Mike Fremer of Analog Planet (Stereophile) fame did three Hong Kong AV Show videos [see below]. I preferred the 2nd video. The 1st was also pretty good [but spending so much of that time going through vinyl? Luckily I did not see too much that I needed, otherwise it would have made me very upset that they are so many thousands of miles away]. The 3rd video was more an ‘extras’.

The Hiendy forum had a few photos and you can read the Google translation [such as it is. In Chrome just lick the translate icon in the top search bar on the right].

The upshot is we have seen most of these brands before at U.S. shows [though there are some very unusual system configurations at this show!]. Skewed toward the expensive [so what else is new?], and has a younger demographic with apparently more women in attendance than previous years. It was very crowded, much like the part of CES dedicated to consumer electronics et. al. [everywhere except for the high-performance audio part of CES, which has not been busy for many years. Maybe it need to be in a convention hall like area and not in a high-rise hotel]

I’ll add more links as I find them…

More praise about the sound of our room at CAS 2017

the Acapella Audio Arts High Cellini (Acapella High Cellini CAS7 YouTube) driven by Acapella’s own integrated amplifier and Audio Note digital front end was just amazingly natural. Throw out all your audiophile terminologies and checklist. The sound was just so pure and natural. They really can fool you. For me, this room won the Best System Performance award, hands down.

Our thanks to Frank Cheng, a reviewer for Dagogo, who had those nice things to say about our room sound at the California Audio Show CAS 2017