Artesania Audio from Spain had their racks and matching new amp stands in a number of very high-profile exhibits. Something even bigger and better than the current Exoteryc range topper is coming. I'll be heading for Barcelona in the fall to report on its availability with a factory tour.

For now here's a closer look at the new gun-metal paint option and Exoteryc amp stand holding a Viola Audio Laboratory monaural amp.

Astell&Kern bowed their flagship AK380 hi-rez player; the T, an active stereo speaker with built-in player; and a CD drive which, via a dock, will turn into a ripper to load CD content straight to their player without an interceding computer. I also talked to AK's boss about WiFi, how it gives us headaches and whether he could do anything about a wired or IR/RF remote alternative for their own server. He promised to look into it.

I chanced upon the Audiodata exhibit on virtually the last leg of my stay just before calling it quits. This room was full. I secured no intel other than to say, this was grand cinema sound clearly not limited to one even very good coaxial driver per side.

Audionet from Germany would appear to play at the very apex of the transistor gear kingdom to warrant a closer look, here playing with KEF's original Blade.

Audiopax had their new Maggiore 50 monos running Avantgarde Duo Omega hornspeakers. This set would be delivered to me two days after the show.

Of three headphone highlights, one was the Audioquest Nighthawk with its vintage microphone-inspired suspension which makes it one of the most comfy, cushy and light high-performance cans I've ever tried. Major lust-bump stuff going off in broad daylight there.

For a closer look at its multi-kulti ingredients—only final assembly occurs in China—here we see the trick suspension; the driver's back; the liquid-wood ear cup from the front and back; and the 3D-printed diffusor in the middle.

AURALiC's system was anchored by Kaiser Acoustics' fabulous middle speaker.

The big news here was the new Aries Mini wireless streaming node [$399/€459] which uses the same 1GHz quad-core ARM Cortex A9 engine and 4GB MLC SSD storage as the big Aries [$1'599/€1'759], gets half its RAM as 512MB DDR3, offers optional HHD/SSD memory, adds a Sabre ES9018K2M DAC, has the same 2.4G75G dual-band WiFi transmission, can accept an external USB drive and is Tidal, Qobuz and WiMP and DSD 256 ready. That was one long but all-true sentence.

What more do you need to know?

Here is a look at one display option of the matching Lightning app. Could this be a game changer? Aussie mate John Darko seems to think so. And not suffering our WiFi allergy, he knows all about these things. A game changer it is then!