AXPONA 2025 Part 7: High-End Audio's Fantastic 5th Floor
Great gear reveals and audiophile trends for music lovers.
Audio Expo North America (AXPONA) 2025 Show Report By Rick Becker

568  SB Acoustics
SB Acoustics makes driver and speaker kits, as the scrim proclaims. The drivers are designed by Danish experts and manufactured by Sinar Baja Electric in Indonesia, the largest of the ASEAN countries (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) with over 256M people. The result is quality speakers at reasonable prices.

The new Gema speaker model I heard here was not unlike the classic JBL 100 from the 1970s. There seems to be a small trend in using large-diameter woofers happening within the high-end audio industry. Frequency response is 36Hz to 24kHz with an efficiency of 87dB/W/m. The kit can be examined on their website.

572  Madisound, Accuton, Clarity Cap, Eton, Fostex, Goertz, Hypex, Markaudio, Morel, Mundorf, Purifi, RAAL, SB Acoustics, Scan-Speak A/S, SEAS, Supra, And WBT
Madisound is a Mecca for the DIY crowd, and that crowd can produce some very fine-sounding speakers for far less than a company with employees and a ton of overhead can afford to sell them. Sweat equity and labor of love are terms you hear often.

I'm familiar with SEAS as a manufacturer of drivers in the Netherlands, but they also have these footers in their stable.

This curated ensemble of drivers includes a woofer with a surround that looks like it had been left in the oven too long. I've seen this type of surround on smaller mid/woofers that sounded excellent, but this is the largest driver with it that I've seen.

They also had samples of Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Loudspeaker Cookbook on display. (You thought I was kidding about those wrinkled surrounds?) Unfortunately, some desperate person stole Volume 2. Yeah, no kidding. Next year, guys, take them to Staples and have a hole punched through them so you can run a cable through them and attach them to a heavy brick.

576  Scan-Speak A/S
Scan-Speak A/S from Denmark is world-renowned for its drivers. If I recall correctly, this kit-built speaker uses their drivers.

These black monoblocks had DIY / Class D faintly silk-screened on their faceplates.

580  jPorter Studios
Jeremy Porter of jPorter Studios in Austin, Texas, broke into high-end audio with a pair of unusual speakers. Contrary to what you might expect here, the smaller stand-mounted monitor was a three-way speaker with a rear-firing woofer. The tall blue speaker is a two-way with dual-opposing woofers. Jeremy is a whiz at CAD/CAM design and building, as both designs include 5x-folded horns and no two facades are of the same shape or dimension. The blue Wellington active tower ($20k, including base) is his best seller, and the new Waterloo Micro three-way with ceramic midrange and tweeter is $6k. With all those angled facades, it was no surprise that he arranged the rig on the diagonal of the room.

The sound was quite good, and I hope he was able to line up some reviews. I didn't catch the streaming source here, but it looked like a Marantz receiver with small monitors driven by Argent Pur Class D monoblocks. Some isolation footers beneath each component might have made the music spectacular.

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