If a serious audio show's bona fides are established by which company exhibits, none perhaps carries greater weight than Wilson Audio. This Utah firm was indeed present with their Watt/Puppy 8 powered by Audio Research electronics. Accordingly, the Audio Show Poland was very serious indeed, many of its exhibits probably providing the very first opportunity attendees had to see and hear specific components first hand. This was an excellent-sounding suite let down only by the predictable choices of music played. In general, the upscale exhibits at the Bristol followed suit while many of the Jan III Sobieski rooms played off-the-cuff stuff. This was likely unintentional but an outside observer could have concluded that the more money spent on the gear, the more restricted the music choices became. Which of course is not how it's supposed to be.
In speaker design, a certain amount of cubic volume is mandatory to achieve given output levels and bass extension. A closer look at a Wilson Benesch monitor demonstrates the extent to which its designers have gone to relegate vital ingredients to the outsides - port pipes whose lengths required protrusion and even the woofer. I missed the closed-door Wilson Benesch/McIntosh demo which was a controlled and timed event but Adam supplied a photo.
US firm WireWorld scored display footage in an importer's exhibit, which, considering the lack of luv cables get from reviewers, was a good thing for WireWorld.
As during a previous CES, the Wiener Lautsprecher Manufacturer aka WLM exhibit -- deceiving in name since the company isn't headquartered in Vienna at all but rather, faraway Sulz -- was among my favorites. The new Diva model is a dual-concentric two-way monitor whose tweeter hides behind the dust cap of the Eminent woofer. The larger room used the firm's top model actively bi-amplified by Cary electronics and proved capable of ferocious dynamics without ever getting fatiguing.
The Xindak/Paradigm exhibit had none other than Anna-Marie Jopek's concert DVD playing when I walked in to have me put images to sound from now on. The big Xindak amplifier on the floor proudly showed off its innards through a plexi top.
Yamaha too lent its corporate presence to the Warsawa event.
Through it all, the staff at the Sobieski where I stayed proved exceptionally helpful and pleasant to make attending and covering this event as a foreign journalist a true peach of an assignment.
To pick out a few cherries from this bumper crop of audio impressions, I'd single out the Ancient Audio, Audio Classic, RCM/Duevel and WLM exhibits as those whose musical values most coincided with mine. Naturally, it's no coincidence then that all these rooms sported tubes. On the subject of new music discovered, I bought three Jopek CDs specifically recommended by a sales man [Nienasycenie, Bosa and Jasnoslyszenie]; Rabih Abou-Khjalil's Journey to the Centre of an Egg; Jan Garbarek's In Praise of Dreams; Trygve Seim's Sangam (like Garbarek on ECM); accordionist Richard Galliano's Laurita; two Kari Bremnes CDs [Over en By and Losrivelse] and -- drum rolls as this is my favorite discovery of the entire trip -- the Cracow Klezmer Band with Warriors, De Profundis and Bereshit. I managed to presample them all in-store for fractions of each track and will have to report more in our world music pages. Initial impressions are that CKB is out-of-this-world, top-billing stuff that belongs in the library of every serious music lover. There it is again, the serious word. But in the best of ways. I had a blast in Warsaw and hope to come back in a year. Major kudos to all who helped make this show the - um, serious success it so clearly was.