I feel like I’m a skipping record. This will be the third time we’ve written about a room featuring Aretai speakers. First time was at Audio Video Show 2022 in Warsaw, Poland, where Doug Schneider was extremely impressed by this Latvian company we’d never heard of. Three years later, at Audio Video Show 2025, I was smitten by the room shared by Aretai and Reed. Not only does Aretai produce excellent-sounding speakers at reasonable prices, it gets them to sound fantastic under show conditions.
And so it was in this room, hosted by DreamScapes A/V, a custom integrator based in Syracuse, New York. Aretai teamed up with Benchmark Media Systems and Grimm Audio, which made for a great combination, both in the resulting sound quality and in the no-nonsense setup. The speakers were the $31,970-per-pair Contra 200Fs (all prices in USD), which were the same speakers that floored me in Warsaw last year.
The Contra 200F is a modestly sized floorstander, and it’s armed with two 8″ woofers, one facing the rear. The two woofers are tuned differently, which makes this a 3.5-way speaker.
I love new music that surprises me, but I rarely get it at shows. Jānis Irbe, the owner of Aretai, has gotten to know my musical tastes, and he was totally down with clearing the room late on this Friday afternoon. Friday at the Florida show is retiree day, with mostly older people in attendance. He cued up “My Name Is Mud” from Primus, and the white-hairs scattered. We went back and forth with obscure, abrasive music in an empty room, laughing all the while.
“Don’t Go Into That Barn” by Tom Waits sounded different from how I’m used to hearing it. Almost slowed down, running through warm honey. But just in time, not tonally. This pulled me forward, drew me in, showed me how truly disturbing this track actually was. A superb presentation.
This system presented huge, effortless, bottom-feeding, dinosaur bass. At one point, on one track, Irbe played a track that blasted bass with a wavelength far longer than the room, setting up a cabin-gain flutter that made me feel nauseous—in a good way. Smooth on top, but extended, with a natural-sounding midrange. This was a great system, working with superb electronics.
In the lobby bar on Thursday night, John Siau, vice president and director of engineering at Benchmark Media Systems, and Doug Schneider spent a good hour discussing esoteric (to me) details of digital audio processing. For the most part, I tuned them out and worked on my beer, but I did absorb enough information to realize that I was listening to someone who really, truly understands the technology that underpins his products. This is important, as amplification and digital audio are now essentially mature technologies, and designers don’t really have to understand how the innards really work in order to implement them.
But Siau knows, down to a molecular level, how his products work. Many years ago, I owned a Benchmark DAC1, and I really liked it. The thing just sat there and worked, and I knew deep down that it was doing what it needed to do and doing it well. It sounded great, and I really don’t remember why I sold it.
Listening to Siau, I started to rethink that sale.
From left to right: Benchmark’s John Siau and and Rory Rall with Aretai’s Jānis Irbe
The system in the DreamScapes A/V room consisted of two Benchmark AHB2 power amplifiers ($3499 each) fed from a Benchmark HPA4 preamp ($3499). The source was a Grimm Audio MU2 streaming DAC ($21,385). Cables were from Benchmark, and the total cost for them was a couple hundred bucks.
At their retail prices, the Benchmark front end cost less than the cables in most of the rooms I passed through on Friday.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
