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

7th Floor

Hollis Audio Labs & Danville Signal Processing Inc.
I was hoping to meet up with Wendell Diller, a life-long employee of Magnepan, who has been developing open-baffle subwoofers to go with planar speakers, but with the airline chaos and weather cancellations, he couldn't get to the show from Minnesota. Bummer!

But I met Rich Hollis of Hollis Audio Labs, who has been working with Danville Signal Processing to develop an external digital crossover & amplification system for crossover-less "Open Architect Concept" Magnepan speakers (which are not available to the public). Basically, the system allows for direct drive of the individual Magnepan panels without a passive crossover. This sounds similar to the concept Bryston uses with their "active" speakers, using an external digital crossover and individual amplifier channels for each driver.

The Danville system includes the digital crossover for the different panels of the Magnepan speakers with upgraded AKM AK4490 DACs ($4k), and separate power amps, which are 4-channels each, $2k each chassis with Hypex amps inside.

The system includes the two passive Mira subwoofers seen here from Ex Machina Soundworks ($5k/pr). The cabinets are 3-D printed, and the driver is modified to Ex Machina's specs. The drivers are used in their big studio monitors, but they use only a single driver for this application. They claim a total of 42mm of excursion, which is quite large. Being an open-baffle design, the sub has a radiation pattern like the planar speaker and it seems to blend quite well with it.

Here's a look at their 8-channel DSP crossover.

Audience AV And Atma-sphere
Taking the elevator down at the Even Hotel on Friday morning a slender gentleman got on with a jacket emblazoned with "Audience". I started with "You're not…" and he replied "John," to which I quickly replied "McDonald."  It was a pleasure I was looking forward to, having reviewed Audience's Hidden Treasure In-Wall AC power cable back in November of 2022, followed by their new flagship FrontRow Reserve AC power cord in October of 2025, both world premieres. I was also very excited to hear their new ClairAudient Bellare floorstanding speaker, based on design principles of their highly acclaimed ClairAudient 1+1 V5 monitor.

The Bellare features a pair of 3" wide-band drivers that sing from 120 Hz to 22 kHz without a crossover. An active bass module with 300 Watts, remote volume control, and auto room correction handles the low frequencies. With a benign impedance of a nominal 9.5 Ohms, the speaker is very tube-friendly, and with a sensitivity of 88dB, combined with the active bass, is said to work splendidly with only 20 Watts or more.

They were driving them with Atma-sphere Class D monoblocks, mounted properly on amp stands with vibration-absorbing footers. The finish continued the theme of the ClairAudient 1+1 V5 monitor, featuring a piano gloss black baffle, top, and rear, with the sides in high-gloss wood veneer—very elegant. Overall, it is of modest size, so it will not visually overpower a medium or large room.

At the rear, I could make out the speaker connections and controls for the active bass module. I noticed the speaker uses a type of vibration-absorbing footer rather than spikes, a trend that is rapidly growing. In this case, they were the diminutive Stillpoints Ultra I S footers.

The Bellare speaker shown was the monopole version with front-firing drivers only, for a projected price of $36k. A bi-pole configuration with rear-firing drivers will be available at $39k. Also debuting here was the Audience Panzerholz Pz6 equipment rack ($24k) seen above.

The full list of components is below. Aside from the Audience speaker and FrontRow Reserve cable loom, the rest of the rig was comprised of mid-priced components, which showed that you can get outstanding results with a great speaker and excellent AC power delivery. In that way, it mimicked my own system, though I've got some tube amps that would likely make it sing even better.

---> Next Page.