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

Elite AV Distribution
Scot Markwell was unable to make it in from the West Coast due to flight chaos, but the room was well setup by his associates.

The room had a familiar look except for the speakers, which were now PranaFidelity Dhyana, a two-way quasi line array design with a tweeter and four 6" woofers with a frequency response of 28Hz to 23kHz. Knowing Steven Norber, the designer, I thought these speakers should be trucked back to the Spiritual Sound room and fed a steady stream of music from Hearts of Space.

The music here was very good—transparent, highly resolved, dynamic, and inviting, and they could probably be driven by my lowish-power tube amps with their 8 Ohm impedance and 88.5dB/W/m sensitivity. It delivered the same high degree of presence as the Prana speaker in the Klaudio room (825).

On top of the rack was a Kuzma turntable with their fabulous (and expensive) tonearm, fitted with a Kuzma cartridge. Below the turntable was a Manley Steelhead phono stage that had a separate power supply sitting on the floor next to the rack. Next was a Manley Jumbo Shrimp preamp, and on the bottom shelf was an Allnic tube power amp.

To the right of the rack was the outstanding Furutech NCF Power Vault that I reviewed in November 2024, about $8k at the time.

This poster shows the construction of the power cable that I reviewed with the impressive Furutech NCF Power Vault. Heady stuff at $10k.

Dreamscapes AV
The Sigberg Audio Manta speakers were acoustically memorable with very accurate sound. The company was from Norway, dealing mostly with the pro audio side and the speakers reflected that heritage. Notice the slots in the cabinet suggesting each driver is in a separate chamber. The slots likely contribute to what they claim as a cardioid dispersion pattern. It was an active speaker fed directly from the Grimm Audio MU2 streamer / DAC / preamplifier. The model 10D subs with dual opposed 10" drivers were not in use, as I recall, or else they were perfectly blended with the main speakers. The price of the speakers with the active subs included was $28k. Each sub was $4,916.

It was a handsome design and made for a very compact rig with the Grimm MU2.

Dreamscapes AV, Grimm Audio, And Amphion
In the second Dreamscapes room here, Trey Taylor (in the above photo) and John Cayanne (in the photo below) put on an informative demonstration of a minimalist system with a Grimm MU2 and Grimm speaker with subwoofer below. The shallow depth of the speaker was said to reduce backwave interference with the drivers, both in the main speaker and the upward-firing subwoofer on the floor beneath it.

The music had excellent resolution and a very black background. I often walk out when the presenters get into lengthy discussions about the gear, but these guys were concise and clear. I'm glad I hung in for their talk and a listen.

On the short wall in this room was another rig, which I listened to the next day. It featured a Grimm MU2 as the digital source feeding a Benchmark preamp and power amps used as monoblocks to drive the white Amphion speakers from Finland. The music here included a xylophone, which is not a typical reference for me, but I could tell this was a very fine system with great resolution, tone, and transparency. I've heard Amphion speakers over the years, and while this is not a well-known brand in the U.S., it is certainly a very good speaker manufacturer, especially if you like the clean Scandinavian styling.

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