Toronto Audiofest 2026 Show Report Part 1
High-End Audio Highlights, New Gear Debuts, And Must-See Listening Rooms
Top-performing listening rooms, exciting product introductions, prestigious audio gear, and value-packed hi-fi sound systems that captivate music lovers.
Toronto Audiofest 2026 Show Report By Rick Becker

244  Atoll Electronique Canada, HiFiPro.ca, AAnd Ricable
Atoll Electronique Canada imports Atoll electronics from France, as well as Final electrostatic speakers from the Netherlands and Davis Acoustic speakers from France. At the Montreal show, they typically squeeze both speaker brands into a small room, and the Final speakers get the short end of the stick. Here, without the Davis speakers and with more room, the outstanding resolution of the Final speakers was readily apparent, and this was a very fine presentation. Ricable is a cable manufacturer from Italy.

Atoll, center and right in the photo, have noticeably improved the quality of their products in the past couple of years. That is the Merging +NADAC DAC on the left.

The Final speakers come in a wide range of sizes, including Hybrid and Hybrid Active styles with dynamic woofers.

248  Coherent Audio And Corby's
Coherent Audio is a boutique speaker manufacturer from Stony Creek, Ontario, whose speakers I've admired and followed for at least a decade. They are very high-efficiency, and the designer, Frank Fazzalari, loves to drive them with tube amplification. At previous Toronto shows, he has teamed up with Corby's Audio, a boutique dealer in Freelton, Ontario, just northwest of Burlington, that is one of the few places I've come across that offers phono cartridge repairs. In the previous venue, they had a rather large room that presented a challenge, and Frank kept building large speakers to fill the space. Here, he took a new direction, and the sound was very exciting.

The 12 FC is somewhat large, but a more familiar proportion for Frank. He used a 12" field coil woofer in combination with a 4" AMT midrange/tweeter, and topped it off with the little supertweeter you can see mounted between the two main drivers. Frequency response is said to be 35 to 28,000 Hz, with efficiency rated at 94 dB. I loved the dark finish and the extraordinary crotch-maple veneer on the front baffle. The burl veneer on the AMT driver on top made a nice complement to the front baffle. Using a field coil woofer meant the bass was tight and clean down to its limit. The built-in wood stand brings the drivers to the proper height without requiring an expensive aftermarket stand. The music was transparent, dynamic, and holographic, driven by the Allnic 300B tube amp.

The white unit below the Technics SL1000 turntable was a van den Hul phono stage—the first I've ever seen. Below that was a Baetis Music Server. On the left was the Allnic amp on top, and the Allnic ASRA OTL tube DAC below it. On the bottom shelf was a Saturn power conditioner.

The phono cartridge was a Van den Hul Crimson XGW ($7,500) mounted on a Van den Hul wooden headshell. What isn't on the room list, but was critically important to the excellent sound here, was the Tough Nut GP-H[m] isolation platform beneath the turntable. I'll have a lot more to say about that when I cover the big rooms in Part 2.

The record clamp is also from Van den Hul, made out of Ebony and priced at a cool $8k, giving the fabled Shun Mook clamp a run for the money. I will be sticking with my sensuous wood clamp from Massif Audio Design, thank you.

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