The last room I visited at the 2019 AXPONA was the best-sounding: the big room shared by Kyomi Audio and MBL on the Renaissance Hotel’s 15th floor. The system comprised MBL’s Noble Line N31 CD player/DAC ($15,400) that I reviewed in February 2018, the N11 preamplifier ($14,600), four N15 monoblock amplifiers ($35,600/pair) and the omnidirectional 101E Mk.2 loudspeakers ($70,500/pair), all hooked up with WireWorld Eclipse Series 8 cables. The N31 is being updated to act as a Roon endpoint, so I hope to be writing a followup.

As luck would have it, Jürgen Reis’s laptop crashed as I walked into the room, but once he had rebooted it and got the music playing—”Fit Song” from Japanese DJ Cornelius, which has superbly live sounding drum samples—I was blown away not only by the dynamics and the full-range sound but also by the enormous yet stable soundstage. I was sitting a couple of chairs away from the center seat but was reminded of the old adage: that when a system is optimized, you get a wide stereo stage even when sitting to one side.

And then it was time to hit the hotel bar with Keith Pray, Ed DiBenedetto, and Rosemarie Torcivia from the Stereophile publishing team. AXPONA was a great show, a fitting successor to the high-end section of the Consumer Electronics Show.

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