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

Alma Audio
I missed this room again this year, as the door is around the corner facing the elevator and I just keep walking straight ahead. Vinnie Rossi caught me in the hall as I was making my sweep at the end of the show, and I realized my oversight. His room was outstanding, which is not uncommon, but I got so involved in conversation with Vinnie I forgot to take photos. Fortunately, I picked up the room sheet to refresh my memory.

I heard the Von Schweikert VR.thirty speakers when they were introduced at Capital Audiofest last year when they rated a Best Rooms award, and again at Axpona where it was cramped in a sleeping room. Here, Suite 850 is about 2.5 times the size of a sleeping room, and with the Vinnie Rossi amplification it was again sounding great.

It was also good to hear Vinnie's gear after a show visitor cranked up the volume fully in the Wynn Audio room at the Toronto show, blowing out the stand-mounted monitors. Nobody likes to see that happen. Fortunately, such events are rare. Glancing down the price list, this room seems to be around $400k, ball-parking in the FM Acoustics phono stage and Kubala-Sosna cables. And that could be low.

ATC Loudspeakers
The ATC SCM20AL speakers looked very familiar—like I had just seen them on silent display at the Toronto show. Here, they were the main event with the source components hidden from sight. Coming from a company that is known for their studio monitors, I highly recommend you hear these before buying. They are very revealing.

With built-in solid state amplification the only opportunities for warming these speakers up are with a tube preamp, phono stage, and DAC. Fit and finish are first class, although stylistically they lean toward 'utilitarian'.

Synergistic Research
In the 'quiet' Synergistic room Andy Weiderspahn showed me the two new products being premiered at the show. The first was the new PowerCell 12 SX power conditioner that replaces the previous 12-outlet PowerCell UEF SX (that was $7k) and slots in between the PowerCell 14 and the PowerCell 8 SX (reviewed here), both of which I have reviewed. The new PowerCell SX gives up the three-zone feature of the PowerCell 14, but incorporates much of the flagship SRX technology, including 3 of the large electromagnetic cells. Andy claimed it comes very close to the PowerCell 14 and offers an even better value at $8k with the Foundation XL High Current power cable included. In typical SR fashion, they also bundle the power conditioner with their better cables at huge savings, allowing you to match (or exceed) the performance of the cables presently in your system.

It is smaller than the previous 12-outlet PowerCell, but larger than the PowerCell 8 SX. It retains a small window in the front, but lacks the top window of the PowerCell 14. Still, it will cast a nice low level of light into your room at night if you wish. You can choose from multiple colors. Further details are already up on their website.

The second new product was the Galileo LUX series of cables, just below the flagship Galileo SRX XL series, replacing the SRX series. It is available in a gorgeous white or traditional black and is designed for the person who wants a ‘plug ‘n play' cable without the complication of tuning modules or ground wires. They have retained the tuning modules on the power cables, but elsewhere the series is greatly simplified. Consequently, the series is voiced to work with a wider range of systems.

The speaker cables and the power cords include some silver ribbons (kind of like a foil) for the first time, contributing a slightly warmer sound, and supplementing the traditional Air-Strings with high-purity silver conductors.

As sometimes happens when I visit a room full of incredible products, I get so wrapped up talking about them, I forget to take photos. Fortunately, I had my video notes. This is not the first time this has happened with Synergistic Research, as their room is always one of the most interesting and best-sounding rooms at a show.

Synergstic Research And Scott Walker Audio
In the 'active' room, I slid in while Ted Denney was demonstrating the prototype of his new Atmosphere LogiQ. Ted must be doing lunch with the billionaires, as he has taken his Atmosphere field effect generator technology to a much higher level, injecting it with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create an ultra-high end Atmosphere product that will not only tune your room to your preference, but also allow you to program individual music selections to your preference so it will replicate the effect every time you call them up.

You can use a smartphone, tablet, or even voice activation. It is like putting recording studio capabilities in a black box without having it connected to your system, and it will all be at your fingertips or the tip of your tongue. It is still in the development stage, but the few capabilities I witnessed during my brief visit suggest this will be something very special. If you are thinking of building an expensive dedicated listening room addition to your home, you might want to hold off for a year or so.

The Atmosphere LogiQ will allow you to create a wider variety of listening environments, almost like moving the walls and redecorating the room, or transporting you to a stadium or famed European music hall. I suspect the black rectangles on the wood pillars in the front corners of the room are part of the Atmosphere LogiQ system. (I didn't want to interrupt Ted's presentation to ask about details.)

Lest I forget, the system was pretty spectacular all by itself with dual Synergistic Voodoo Streamer/Servers, one for core, the other as the Roon endpoint, seen here on the top two shelves of the Synergistic rack. The new PowerCell 12 SX is on the low stand in front of the racks. An Ideon Audio Absolute DAC ε meta edition, along with Audio Research preamp and power amp, were on the right side rack. The rig was wired with a loom of the new Galileo Lux series of cables in the beautiful white jackets.

Certainly not to be overlooked was the gorgeous Acora Acoustics SRC-2 floorstanding loudspeakers in Mystic Grey, one of the standard stones for this model. Be sure to read my world premiere review of the Acora Acoustics QRC 2 Floorstanding Loudspeaker. Back to CAF 2025, the SRC-2 was adorned with Synergistic's HFT speaker tuning dots and their forthcoming footers sitting on thick carbon fiber discs. I use the less expensive quartz version of this speaker as my reference because Acora is one of the few high-quality speakers that can be successfully driven by lower powered (~20 Wpc) tube amplifiers, allowing me flexibility for reviewing. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it sounds fantastic with solid-state amps, too.

Luxury Audio Group
Aldo Filippelli is also well known for putting together outstanding rooms, and here he assembled a scaled-down version of his show-stopping presentation at the Chicago event, using a smaller speaker from the Estelon line from our NATO partners in Estonia.

I heard music from BB King on the Sonorus tape deck that was superb. Below the decks were a Vitus Audio integrated amp and a Taiko SGM Extreme music server (reviewed here). The decks and server were sitting on Seismion active vibration-absorbing platforms (~$20k each), but the amp was a bit too tall to accept a Seismion in this rack.

The secret sauce here, as in Chicago, was the liberal use of A.R.T. (Audio Realignment Technologies) products that magically improve sound quality with their devices clamped around cables and placed atop electronic components. Having reviewed some similar products and being impressed with Aldo's room at two successive shows, the A.R.T. components seem very promising. That's Crystal Cable Infinite Dream speaker cable in the above photo, which is also pretty special.

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