Show Reports

A post-election visit to the Washington, DC, metro area for the 2024 edition of Capital Audiofest (a.k.a. CAF) brought plenty of hi-fi fun, including some great sounds and music along with new faces, exhibitors, and products. Helmed once again by Gary Gill, this year’s event took place from November 8-10, 2024, at the Twinbrook Hilton in Rockville, Maryland. According to Gill, CAF 2024 welcomed approximately 4,750 attendees, a figure that exceeded last year’s record number of around 4,200.

In recent years, CAF has continued expanding to encompass exhibit rooms across more than four floors in addition to dozens of other exhibitors in conference rooms and halls throughout the hotel — 125 rooms, and 50 booths in all — including vinyl and accessories sellers in the atrium. We here at AP figured we’d approach things a bit differently this time around and post multiple, short-form analog-centric highlights from the show across several brief installments — so, without further preamble, here’s Part 1.

BELLESON
Based in South Carolina, Belleson manufactures their own op-amps, proprietary Superpower voltage regulators, and other components. The company has been around since 2010 as a high-end parts supplier to certain hi-fi brands, including Linear Tube Audio (LTA), whose gear was also represented in their room.

In recent years, they’ve begun producing their own amplification products, including the Belleson Brilliance Phono Amp phono preamp that I reported on from CAF 2023. This year, the company’s demo system included their latest Belleson Radiance phono preamp, as seen in the beauty shot above. (The Radiance is currently available for a CAF discount price of $2,925 through November 30, 2024; then its SRP reverts back up to $3,250.)

Although the Radiance is housed in a half-size chassis, it contains essentially the same components as its “big brother” Brilliance, as Belleson co-founder and lead engineer Brian Lowe told me, but with a single stereo input (balanced or single-ended) and a ground terminal. Its Wi-Fi HiFi remote control enables switching between MM and MC cartridges, as well as allowing users to make “on the fly” adjustments to their respective gain resistive and capacitive loading. Settings can be saved. The unit uses 40 custom, optically isolated Octal Opto analog switches for those controls. Radiance is direct coupled from input to output, which is said to benefit bass response, and it deploys a servo correction loop to null DC offset noise, according to Belleson’s site.

REGA
Ahead of the Radiance was a Rega Planar 6 turntable ($2,895) with a dual-layer float glass platter. It was outfitted with the company’s own RB330 tonearm and Anai Pro cartridge. Also in the system were Linear Tube Audio electronics — an LTA microZOTL preamp and a ZOTL Ultrlinear+ power amp driving Volti Audio’s new Lucera loudspeakers of three-way hybrid horn/bass-reflex design (as seen below). Anticables supplied cabling. For good measure, there was also a Belleson Brilliance phono preamp on passive display.

Miles Davis’ perennial classic August 1959 Columbia LP Kind of Blue (the 2015 Tempo edition) was playing when I entered the room — hard to go wrong with that ubiquitous classic! (Or its soon-to-be-released precursor, which you can read more about here.) All of Blue was to scale, sounding quite natural and in keeping with what I’m accustomed to hearing of it (across a few different versions/editions).

Among other tracks I listened to on this system were “Humain” (Side 1, Track 1) and “But Beautiful” (Side 1, Track 3) from jazz pianist Tony Tixier’s 2020 LP I Am Human, on Whirlwind Recordings. His piano sounded warm and ever-so-slightly dark in tonal balance, yet still convincing. Ben Leifer’s double-bass strings rattled and reverberated pleasingly, and the instruments seemed closely miked on this intimate recording.

I also gave my own Bonny Light Horseman LP a spin, taking in the title track (among others) from this three-piece folk band’s self-titled 2020 release on 37d03d. The lush vocal harmonies of Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman sounded full-bodied as the music emerged from dark and quiet backgrounds, a perception in line with a low noise floor.

Part 2 coming soon!

Author bio: Julie Mullins, a lifelong music lover and audiophile by osmosis who grew up listening to her father’s hi-fi gear, is also a contributing editor and reviewer on our sister site, Stereophile, for whom she also writes the monthly Re-Tales column. A former fulltime staffer at Cincinnati’s long-running alt-weekly CityBeat, she hosts a weekly radio show on WAIF called On the Pulse.

For more of our CAF 2024 coverage, go to Ken Micallef’s turntable video extravaganza here.