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Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

Over the years that SoundStage! has covered Audio Video Show in Warsaw, we’ve watched different companies evolve. Companies will often occupy the same room, but as the years go by, their products will change.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

I’m not exaggerating with that title, nor am I when I say this: Finland’s DSPeaker put together one of the best-sounding rooms at the Radisson Blu Sobieski hotel this year. When I tell you it sounded right, I don’t mean it only felt like it to me—I got proof. Measurements and everything. Mark my words, manufacturers and audiophiles alike will be doing themselves a favor by incorporating DSP-based room correction going forward. DSPeaker’s products make that easier and more accessible than ever before.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

Who doesn’t love a good controversy? SoundStage! founder and publisher Doug Schneider is not a fan of single-driver loudspeakers. And he has offered a strong defense for his point of view, to be sure. The thing is, I’m not so sure it’s a sin to love them. When I found a smallish room tucked at the end of the hall here at the PGE Narodowy stadium at Audio Video Show 2025, I was met with some conflicting feelings. Does the single-driver, open-baffle speaker system put together here by the Katowice-based company Closer Acoustics actually sound great, or am I being tricked? To me, there’s no controversy here.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

I have railed against ugly, boxy, plain speakers on more than one occasion. But I’ve also stated, again, on more than one occasion, that sound quality should come first, should be our first principle. I even recall saying something to the effect of “if a speaker sounds good, we shouldn’t care if it’s made out of concrete, with pieces of rebar sticking out at odd angles.”

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

Despite looking sort of like the furniture from the Swedish chain, the Soft Collective SC‑05 loudspeaker is kind of the anti-Ikea loudspeaker. OK, not entirely, in that it is made in Sweden and has a pale wooden finish. But it’s very un-Ikea-like is its solid-birch construction. The same could be said for its distinctive design, which was developed in cooperation with Gärsnäs, a company that’s been making furniture in Stockholm since 1893. The price tag of €20,000 per pair is very not-Ikea (all prices in euros). And you certainly don’t have to assemble the speakers yourself.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

I never get tired of Vivid’s big, colorful, dramatic speakers. They make me smile every time I see them. I think it’s fair to say that Vivid speakers are the most immediately recognizable products in all of audio.

Details: Written by: Doug Schneider; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

Over the last few years, I’ve taken a less visible role in our show-coverage team. Instead of focusing on writing articles, I take most of the photos and edit all of them, and I also create show-based social-media posts. Doing so has freed me up to do more listening, because I’ve been relying on Jason Thorpe and Matt Bonaccio to do the time-consuming, tedious work of gathering detailed product information.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 26 October 2025

Audio Video Show 2025 is larger this year, with the show organizers having added a 25 percent more exhibit space onto the already-extensive floorplan at the PGE Narodowy stadium. The additional space was comprised of large rooms that sounded especially good, probably due to optimal damping and irregular wall and floor layouts.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 25 October 2025

Love, beauty, passion—these are all ideals that high-end audio manufacturers love to espouse as cornerstones of their brands. It’s marketing BS; hardly anyone is really under the impression that black metallic boxes or room-dominating loudspeaker boxes are pure expressions of beauty, right? Making its worldwide debut in the 4400-square-foot Amsterdam room at the PGE Narodowy stadium, the Lampizator Aphrodite DAC challenges that assumption. So do the Clarisys Aria magnetostatic ribbon speakers, which were also demonstrated here.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 25 October 2025

We’ve discovered that, when we come to Warsaw to cover the annual Audio Video Show, we must always spend our first day at the stadium location, PGE Narodowy. It’s just too busy there on the weekend. This year, we were expecting to be impressed with the new large exhibition rooms that have been added to the venue. When I looked in the London room shared by Spanish speaker maker Lorenzo Audio Labs and their local distributor ZenSati, I saw a pair of refrigerator-sized loudspeakers trimmed in a natural wood veneer that could only be described as “decadent.” Impressed? Yeah.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 25 October 2025

How is it possible for Italian men to be so goddamn graceful? The lilting accent, casually stylish habiliment, as if it’s just natural. I always feel like a shambling oaf when I’m around Italians. So it was on Friday morning at the PGE Narodowy stadium, the site that Diapason chose for the unveiling of their newest speaker, the Didascalìa.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 24 October 2025

Over the last few years at Audio Video Show here in Warsaw and at High End in Munich, Canada’s EMM Labs has shared rooms with their distributors, and thus with other manufacturers. At Audio Video Show 2025, EMM Labs was hosting the room, and the equipment rack at the front was filled with a collection of components that looked like it had been freshly unloaded from the Death Star.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: Audio Video Show 2025; Created: 24 October 2025

Varso Place is a skyscraper in Warsaw overlooking the Warszawa Centralna railway station and the historic Palace of Culture and Science. Standing 310 meters tall, Varso is the tallest building in Poland. In fact, it’s the tallest building in Europe outside of Russia, beating the Shard in London by a handful of inches. If I crane my neck, I can just barely make out its silhouette through the October fog from my hotel room window.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

“Find Kroma Atelier. I think they’re upstairs somewhere,” Doug Schneider told me. The MOC is huge, and there are a gazillion exhibitors. I didn’t find them under “C” in the directory, so I told Doug I wasn’t having any luck.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

Conspicuous “CAD” logos filled the front door of Computer Audio Design’s exhibit at High End 2025. What is this? I wondered. Computer-aided design has been used for decades in hi-fi products. Could this be a system designed by a computer? Was I about to hear a system designed by AI?

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

As SoundStage! Ultra senior editor Jason Thorpe and I wandered the halls and atria of the Munich Order Center on Saturday morning, we decided to stop for a brief rest near the entrance of the building. As we lounged on a white-cushioned bench, we looked up, almost in unison, at the conspicuous 12-foot-tall poster directly in front of us. It urged us to head to the Auer Acoustics room and see the company’s new speakers.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

When I heard that JBL would be debuting a line of new speakers here at High End 2025, I was half-thinking I’d be checking out some tablet-shaped Bluetooth speaker blasting Taylor Swift, because there’s a lot of this stuff sold under the JBL brand.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

Please cast your mind back to last year’s High End, where I related the peak experience of listening to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” on PMC’s huge, powerful roller coaster of a system. It was the most intense audio-related experience of my life.

Details: Written by: Matt Bonaccio; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

I don’t have any experience with Advance Paris outside of things I’ve seen and heard online—a video clip here and there, but no meaningful interaction beyond that, and certainly no hands-on time. If you’re located in North America like me, you’re likely in the same boat. That’s because, even though 2025 marks the brand’s 30th anniversary, it’s only had distribution in North America for a couple of years. The brand’s as-yet subdued North American presence has done nothing to dampen the festivities here in Munich: at High End 2025, Advance Paris announced five new products, all part of its new premium Nova line. Prices are all in euros.

Details: Written by: Jason Thorpe; Category: High End 2025; Created: 18 May 2025

Estelon has been on a roll lately, filling in its product range with smaller, less expensive models. That makes sense to me. After all, I’ve heard its top-of-the-line speaker, the Extreme, at several audio shows, and I don’t think there’s anywhere further north to go for Estelon. The Extreme is always in the running for my best of show, and it sells for maybe a quarter of the price of some other statement speakers that don’t sound anywhere near as good.