AXPONA 2015: Getting Ready

My wife and I are headed to Chicago next Wednesday for the 7th annual AXPONA audio trade show (there must be some award given for companies that have been part of all of the AXPONA shows!). It’s being held at the O’Hare Westin Hotel from April 24-26. AIX Records and our partners have something really special in store for attendees that find their way to the Lakeshore B Ballroom. I believe we will have the first demonstration system that will be playing REAL high-resolution audio. What do I mean by that? I mean that from source to speaker, the specifications of every stage meet or exceed the requirements laid out by the JAS (Japan Audio Society) for their High-Res Music logo. As you may remember, their specifications extend to 40 kHz from microphone to speaker AND a dynamic range that reaches 130 dB and more. Before you post comments about the difficulties associated with actually achieving this level of fidelity, please be aware that I know it’s impossible. But at least, our demonstration room is starting with a system that has the potential to eclipse anything you’ve experienced before. And I include the system that we setup last year with German Physiks and others…that system was really good but for various reasons failed to meet my standards.

The partners this year at Dolby Laboratories (we employ Dolby TrueHD encoding for our high-resolution audio files), Oppo Digital (we’ll have a customized “all digital output” BDP-105 in the room), Benchmark Digital (there will be 3 DAC2 HGC converters and 3 of the incredible AHB2 power amplifiers), DH Labs cables (for all interconnects and speaker feeds), Revel Salon 2 speakers for the mains and 2 Revel B112 Subwoofers. We will also have a PC-based music server running JRiver and outputting digitally via a Lynx card. My good friends at JVC will be bringing their latest 4K upsamping projector and a Stewart Filmscreen screen to show off the high-definition video that we provide on our Blu-ray discs.

It was a little bit of a struggle to get all of the hardware sorted out. Asking for a stereo pair of speakers, amplifiers, etc. is not nearly as hard as asking for a full 5.1 surround setup. But I believe it’s important for attendees to hear the best music recordings through the best system I can get together. And this means having a high-resolution digital system in full 5.1 surround AND video. You just can’t achieve the same level of fidelity with vinyl LPs, analog tapes, CDs or files that have been sourced from standard resolution formats. I’m sure there will be other rooms that sound really good, but they can’t reach the fidelity of real life using compromised sources and gear.

I’ve spent the last several months trying to pull together the next version of the AIX Records sampler…the 2015 version. I had hoped to be able to sell it at the show. However, it’s proving very difficult to finish. In the past, my blu-ray samplers have included only productions that were shot in HD-Video. That limits what I can demonstrate to products completed in the last 7 years or so. But AIX made some killer recordings prior to that. So I’m including some of my favorite recordings from the standard definition video period. The videos will be smaller but the sound is the same as the current stuff.

The new sampler has 70 tracks…or about 2 minutes of 70 tracks. They are equally divided between vocal, instrumental, and classical selections. I just auditioned the whole thing and it’s terrific…but sadly not available yet. I’m burning some preview copies for use at the AXPONA show but there are still problems that need to be solved. It’s nice to know that everything fits on the BD-Rs (I did have to back down to Dolby Digital instead of Dolby TrueHD for the “Audience” perspective mixes due to size limitations and the video in encoded at a pretty low rate but I’d rather you get a taste of a lot of different productions rather than limit the track count.

I hope to see many of you in Chicago. Please stop by and say hello.