Country of Origin
This review published on HifiKnights.com May 2026. By request of the manufacturer and permission of the author, it is herewith syndicated to reach a broader audience. – Ed.
Reviewer: Dawid Grzyb
Transport: Innuos Statement, fidata HFAS1-S10U
DAC: LampizatOr Horizon360 w. Stradi 5U4G + Psvane Art TIII 4x KT88 / 2x 6SN7
USB components: iFi audio Mercury3.0
Network: Fidelizer EtherStream, Linksys WRT160N
Preamplifier: Trilogy 915R, Thöress DFP
Amplifier: Trilogy 995R, FirstWatt F7, Enleum AMP-23R
Speakers: Boenicke Audio W11 SE+, sound|kaos Vox 3afw
Headphones: HifiMan Susvara
Interconnects: LessLoss Entropic Process C-MARC, Boenicke Audio IC3 CG
Speaker cables: Boenicke Audio S3, LessLoss C-MARC
Speaker signal conditioning: LessLoss Firewall for Loudspeakers, Boenicke ComDev
Anti-vibration conditioning: 12x Carbide Audio Carbide Base under DAC, preamp and speakers
Power delivery: Gigawatt PC-3 SE EVO+/LC-3 EVO, LessLoss C-MARC, LessLoss Entropic Process C-MARC, Boenicke Audio Power Gate, ISOL-8 Prometheus
Equipment rack: Franc Audio Accessories Wood Block Rack 1+3
Review component retail: €4'999

5'364m. For those involved in this industry, Adam Mokrzycki needs no introduction. Should that somehow not apply, here's the short version. Alongside his wife Gabriela and several other equally battle-hardened individuals, Adam has been running the Polish Audio Video Show for roughly three decades now. Saying that he is Audio Video Show wouldn't be much of an exaggeration. At this point event and man feel almost symbiotic: as though one couldn't properly exist without the other. I'm fortunate enough to call him a good friend. We go back some 15 years. Back then I worked for what was one of Poland's largest IT websites. My assignments involved gaming headphones, sound cards and other delights engineered specifically to ensure that virtual grenades exploded with sufficient theatrical authority. It's fair to say that things escalated since though that's a different story entirely. I honestly can't remember how Adam and I first met. Neither can he. Our safest bet is painfully mundane. Either my editor contacted him for a press pass or Adam contacted the editorial office. Someone exchanged emails, someone answered and eventually I was the poor soul selected to attend Audio Video Show and prepare coverage. At the time my entire audio universe revolved around headphones. Consequently, walking into a multi-€Mill stereo setup for the first time felt like accidentally entering a Formula 1 garage after years spent driving a shopping cart on a lawnmower engine. I don't remember exactly what went through my head during that inaugural show but I strongly suspect that said head spent most of the weekend spinning like a ceiling fan in panic mode. Until then I'd treated stereo as a distant slightly eccentric hobby cultivated by men with bank accounts most people can only dream about. The show changed that perspective rather violently. It turned out there was room there for virtually every budget. It's also more than likely that during that particular weekend I decided what I actually wanted to write about moving forward. Some time later I met Srajan, the stars aligned in their peculiar fashion and the rest is history. Ever since, I haven't missed a single Audio Video Show. Not one. Yet hardware eventually became secondary. I realize how odd that may sound in the context of one of Europe's largest audio exhibitions but there it is. For most attendees the attraction naturally revolves around equipment. Loudspeakers the size of refrigerators. Amplifiers heavy enough to alter tectonic activity. Turntables resembling kinetic sculptures. DACs apparently machined from retired naval artillery parts. That's understandable. Audio people enjoy eye candy just as much as the next tribe.

To me however, Audio Video Show gradually evolved into something else. These days it's far less about hardware and far more about atmosphere, familiar faces and socializing. Sure, audio remains the main attraction. But after enough years in this industry, you eventually realize that people are what make these events worthwhile in the first place. Today Audio Video Show stands as the second-largest event of its kind in Europe and one of the planet's biggest. Now the realization that this whole operation is largely the result of one chap and a relatively small crew is deeply impressive. It also has me proud that such a thing exists on Polish soil. Building an event of this calibre requires equal measures of stubbornness, organization, diplomacy and controlled insanity. Adam somehow possesses all four. What many people don't realize is just how much work it takes to keep this machine alive. To be fair, neither do I. Not fully. But Adam and I talk frequently enough for me to have at least a vague understanding of the madness involved. Once the annual edition ends and the doors close behind thousands of visitors, he gets a brief respite to breathe; brief being the operative word. Soon afterward, preparations for the next edition begin. Around May or June it already becomes more difficult to get hold of him. A month later the man practically disappears into organizational hyperspace. From that point onward, Adam's daily email intake reaches numbers most people would classify as a cyberattack. Think hundreds upon hundreds of messages related to exhibitors, logistics, shipping, room allocations, power requirements, hotel snafus, scheduling disasters and countless smaller emergencies nobody outside the industry ever sees. This continues until the event goes live. Once Audio Video Show finally starts, those familiar with Adam may agree on one thing. He looks like a zombie; a happy zombie but still one held together mostly by caffeine, adrenaline and whatever obscure life-support protocol activates in crisis-management specialists. During those few autumn days he doesn't relax, rest or enjoy music. He moves. Constantly. One room, another room, another corridor, another fire to extinguish before it escalates into a full-blown audiophile catastrophe. Somewhere a network died, somewhere a shipment didn't arrive, elsewhere an exhibitor desperately needs furniture, power strips or divine intervention. Adam handles all of it with the calm efficiency of someone who has been solving exactly these kinds of problems for 30 years. At this point I'm fairly certain that peak organization and thriving on chaos are encoded somewhere in his DNA.
Most journalists attending shows are probably familiar with all of the above. Adam knows virtually everyone in this industry and everyone knows him. Naturally the man has many hobbies outside audio but today we'll narrow our focus to one very specific obsession related to it. This is where our story gains momentum. I honestly can't remember when Adam first visited my current listening room. 2018 perhaps, give or take a year. Every now and then he drops by when nearby with a moment to spare. Slim odds are that he may genuinely enjoy the sound my setup produces, courtesy of those tiny sound|kaos Vox monitors I've been using for quite some time now. Up to a point I suspected that even if the entire thing sounded dreadful by his standards, he was simply too polite to say so. Or at least that's what I chose to believe. Mind you, this is a man who has seen and heard practically everything our industry has to offer. I strongly suspect he visited more manufacturers than most of us press people combined. Still, until early 2025 I had absolutely no idea that server/streamer hardware constitute one of his major personal obsessions. Apparently this particular rabbit hole consumed him more than a decade ago and never quite let go. That brings us to early 2025. By then the oh-so-magnificent Innuos Statement Next-Gen already occupied its rightful place in my system. One day Adam called and asked whether he could stop by with something. The exact nature of said something remained undisclosed. "By all means," I replied. "Last time I checked, we're still friends. I'm not charging you for my time. Yet."

What arrived at my place initially looked less commercial and more aftermath of a highly specialized engineering incident. Imagine a wooden board densely populated with recognizable components alongside quite a few bits I had never encountered in hardware of this type before. Expensive clocks, unusual power arrangements, supercapacitors housed inside 3D-printed structures and several other wicked contraptions occupied the nearby space. To cut the suspense, that peculiar assembly turned out to be Adam's working prototype for a server/streamer unlike anything else he had ever put together. Although over the years he had assembled numerous audio servers for friends, this project was clearly different. It was also serious enough to entertain transforming a long-developed hobby into an actual business venture. Come to think of it, there's a lot of common sense in that. Very few people know this industry as intimately as Adam; and that still comes on top of him being genuinely passionate about digital audio instead of merely professionally adjacent. There's more to this. As absurdly time-consuming as Audio Video Show is, for years it had actually been Adam's side hustle. His core business revolved running a specialist language school. Past tense wasn't accidental. A while ago he sold it which freed up some schedule space for other endeavours. Now we know that designing a server/streamer from scratch as a commercial effort and releasing it under his own banner qualified as one of them.