Audio Advice Live

Audio Advice Live 2024 called it a wrap on Sunday at the Sheraton Hotel in Raleigh, NC where upwards of a hundred companies showed off the latest and greatest AV gear. Here’s a taste of what we saw and heard…

Bowers & Wilkins staged a rare demo of the iconic and thoroughly unique Nautilus speaker, which except for last year’s special 30th anniversary finish, has not changed since it was introduced 31 years ago. The current iteration of this $100,000/pair tour de force has the same form factor as the original speaker and employs the same drivers and same build concept, including custom-tuned external crossovers. The speaker was the brainchild of company founder John Bowers, who initiated the project shortly before he died in 1987, leaving lead engineer Laurence Dickie to fulfill the dream six years later. Bowers vision was to make a cabinet that’s not a cabinet. The Nautilus has four drivers and requires four channels of power per speaker. For the show demo, a pair of Classé Audio Delta Stereo hybrid Class A amplifiers was used to power each speaker. Watch the video here.

A second B&W demo featured a Dolby Atmos-capable home theater system featuring 800 D4 series speakers, a Marantz AV 10 15.4-channel preamp/processor, 200 x 16-watt Marantz Amp 10 power amp, and three Classé Audio 350-watt hybrid Class A Delta Mono amplifiers (for the front channels). The speaker lineup: Two flagship 801 D4 main speakers ($42,000/pair) and an HTM81 D4 center speaker up front, four 803 D4 serving as surrounds, four CCM7.5 S2 height speakers mounted in the ceiling, and four powered subwoofers, each fed by one of the AV 10’s four independent sub outputs and subject to its directional bass-management system. Watch the video here.

Klipsch gave us a booth tour featuring a Reference Premiere series home theater setup with two RP-8000F II towers and an RP-504C II center speaker up front, a pair of RP-5000F II towers for surrounds, and four PRO-180RPC height-channel speakers in the ceiling — all anchored by four mammoth RP-1600SW powered subwoofers, each packing 800 watts of RMS power. More impressive is that the entire system (except for those subs) was driven with Onkyo’s top-of-the-line AV receiver, the 11.2-channel TX-RZ70, which boasts a multitude of features, including THX and IMAX Enhanced certification and Dirac Live room correction. Klipsch also provided an overview of its new Flexus soundbar system and other models in its lineup, including the Three Plus and One Plus all-in-one tabletop speakers. Watch the video here.

JL Audio mated its high-performance Dominion d110 powered subwoofer with a pair of Paradigm 40B bookshelf speakers to demonstrate not only how bass becomes more lifelike but how midrange clarity improves when a subwoofer is added and (in this case) crossed over below 100 Hz. The d110 sells for $1,199 in black gloss or $1,099 in black ash. The company also demonstrated its free TüN audio-measurement software and showcased the benefits of using two or more subwoofers. Watch the video here.

Theory Audio Design demonstrated a 7.2-channel home theater speaker system featuring two sub15 passive subwoofers, each rated down to 22 Hz, and seven of its sb25 high-output multi-use speakers, each sporting pro-style drivers for “dynamic range that exceeds anything you can get with home loudspeakers” without sacrificing resolution and tonal accuracy; the sb25 can be mounted on a stand or on the wall with its integral bracket and is also available as an in-wall speaker (IW25). The heart of each subwoofer is a 15-inch woofer with a massive 3-inch voice coil. Everything was powered by Theory’s nine-channel ALC-1809 amplifier/controller, rated at 4 ohms to deliver 3 x 300 watts + 6 x 100 watts and featuring a whopping 20 bands of parametric equalization per channel. Total system cost: $16,700. Surround processing for the demo was handled by Storm Audio’s $14,000 ISP Core 16 featuring active room treatment with bass control. Video was processed by MadVR and displayed on a 77-inch LG TV. Watch the booth tour here.