Inside CAF 2025 Luxury Hi-Fi Show Part 1 — Capital Audiofest's Top Floors With 84 Rooms
New trends you need to know about, the latest audio gear, and not to be missed rooms!
Capital Audiofest 2025 Show Report By Rick Becker

The Listening Room
Again, Audia Flight, Aurender, and the AVM power conditioner.

Perlisten speakers are designed in the U.S. and made in China, I believe. I was hoping to hear one of their subwoofers (They make many.) and talk with someone about them, but the rooms were not well staffed.

The Listening Room
The Diptyque Audio electrostatic speakers from France have been among my favorites at the Canadian shows for years. On the top shelf were the Grimm phono stage and the Michell turntable. Below it was a Kora integrated amp from France and a Grimm MU2, one of the most highly respected streamers today.

It was nice to see the decades old Michell Gyro SE turntable from England in action at this show. At Toronto, Mitchell had a large display with all their record player models on silent display, which I covered in some detail. The Gyro SE turntable is not their top model, but their best-selling one over the decades. It was fitted with a Hana SL Mk II cartridge.

The Listening Room
The Grimm LS1c 'next generation' flagship active speaker with accompanying subwoofer needed only the Grimm MU1 streamer to complete the system. There were numerous rooms with Grimm at the show, and in one of them, I had a very impressive demonstration and explanation of their technology, including the integral feedback in the woofer that greatly reduced distortion in the bass.

Nordost Cables And Accessories
Rather than run a cable comparison, Nordost simply ran with a very well-balanced system with a nice preamp / streamer / DAC mated with a stereo power amp. The loudspeaker was a Blue Note Award earning Raidho X 2.6 as reviewed by Enjoy the Music.com, around $25k, from their less expensive X series. Cables were Nordost Frey 2 power cables and speaker cables, and Norodst Tyr 2 single-ended interconnects and USB cable.

A Nordost Q Base 8 power distribution bar with a pair of Qsine and a pair of Qwave plug-in AC power conditioners were being put to great use.

All in, this was a very nice system.

Afton Mountain Audio
Afton Mountain Audio, not far from the Blue Ridge Parkway, southwest of Washington, DC, put together an ambitious rig with LTA gear driving large floorstanding Sound Lab G5 speakers ($29,500). Top shelf, on the right was the Aero DAC. Below that was the flagship MicroZOTL preamp Level 3 ($5,950). And on the bottom shelf were a pair of Century Monoblocks, flagship high-powered ZOTL (Zero-Hysteresis Output Transformer-less) amplifiers developed in collaboration with renowned audio designer David Berning.

Each amp puts out 110W into 8 Ohm / 144W into 4 Ohm and is stable below 2 Ohm @ 1% THD. A switch on the faceplate adjusts the level of feedback. To the right of the rack was an Audience AdeptResponse power conditioner, so be sure to read our Audience aR6-T4 power conditioner review to learn more about this fantastic audio tweak.

A Pure Fidelity turntable from Canada was above a barely visible Innuos Stream 1 streamer. Below the streamer was an Aurorasound Vida Mk II phono stage.

This price list shows many pieces of audiophile gear at CAF 2025 listed that were likely in the rig.

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