Inside CAF 2025 Luxury Hi-Fi Show Part 2 — Capital Audiofest's Large Exhibit Rooms And Lobby Displays
Fresh trends, the hottest audio equipment, and rooms everyone's talking about.
Capital Audiofest 2025 Show Report By Rick Becker

Gryphon Audio And Command Performance AV
Command Performance AV from Falls Church, VA, proudly offers Gryphon Audio Designs to their best clients. While their exhibit room has been hit or miss over the years, this year hit it big time with the Marten Mingus Quintet 2 speaker and Gryphon Audio gear. As usual, they set up the room on the diagonal.

The speaker was the Mingus Quintet 2 Statement ($120k), the smallest of the Mingus series. It always comes in a gloss black finish, but the top and bottom wood caps are available in three stains and five different glossy colors. The light oak finish shown here was the least adventurous of the bunch, outside of matching gloss black. The colors have some exciting possibilities. The speaker features an Accuton diamond tweeter for a superb top end, a ceramic midrange, and 7" aluminum sandwich laminate drivers below. The Marten isolation footers were among the first designed by IsoAcoustics in conjunction with a speaker manufacturer.

As longtime fans of Enjoy the Music.com know, Gryphon Audio precision engineers and hand crafts the very best high-end audio gear. Their Essence preamp ($21.5k, reviewed here) in the rack fed the new Gryphon Antileon Revelation ($49.8k), which puts out 165 Wpc in pure Class A. It weighs 185lbs, so invite friends when you want to move it. As you can see from the speaker cable, they used Transparent XL cables in this system. The power conditioner ($15.7k) was also from Gryphon. This is the 40th anniversary of Gryphon ApS from Denmark, and this was the North American premiere of the Antileon Revelation amp.

A Berkeley Reference DAC ($34k) was used along with the U.S. premiere of the Aurender N50 Music Server ($38.5k) for streaming, but I stayed long enough to also hear music from the J.Sikora Standard MAX Supreme turntable ($40.8k), with KV Max 12 tonearm ($15.7k) fitted with an Aidas Violet Gold stone composite cartridge ($7,535) from Lithuania, another NATO ally. The phono stage was a tube Doshi Evo ($24k), all of which may explain why I preferred the analog experience over the streamed one here.

Turn Left
At this point, I took a left turn and started zig-zagging down a long hallway filled with display tables and five of the biggest rooms at the show.

VK Music
Victor Kung had his long table filled with tube amp kits and was drawing a lot of attention. He's been a mainstay of the audiophile scene for decades.

Linsould North America

Ginko Audio
Vinh Vu was most eager to show Enjoy the Music.com a new DIY MooVu speaker kit ($499/pr + $300  cabinets/pr) that is supposed to be quite good. It was demonstrated in the DC HiFi Group room (706) twice each day for an hour. I tried to make it up there to hear it, but had to keep pressing onward.

Later on, I spotted Ken Stevens of CAT using their ARCH footers, which are very effective and affordable.

Paul Wakeen of Stillpoints was keeping tabs on business from a comfortable countertop in the hallway. We go back to 2003 when I did their first review after encountering their initial footer design at the Montreal show. I've pointed out their footers and equipment rack in previous rooms at this show. They've come a long way over the years.

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