Show Reports

Welcome back to Part 2 of my Florida International Audio Expo 2025 show report! Let’s get right back into it — starting with a truly great turntable from Polish manufacturer Benny Audio.

BENNY AUDIO / SUPREME ACOUSTIC SYSTEMS
Two of the three demo rooms that Supreme Acoustic Systems — a distribution company helmed by Hiram Toro — showed at FLAX 2025 demo’ed Benny Audio’s Odyssey turntable. (For more on Supreme Acoustic Systems, see my November 2024 Re-Tales column about them here on our sister site Stereophile.)

Benny Audio first captured my attention at the High End Munich show in May 2024, where designer/manufacturer Tomasz Franielczyk told me all about the Polish company’s then-new Benny Audio Odyssey turntable, which I reported on here on AP on June 18, 2024.

The Odyssey table’s design revolves around one belt, one motor, and various platter materials, including Delrin/POM and stainless steel. A few key points from my prior Munich report bear repeating on this newer-to-market turntable. For one thing, the Odyssey has an outboard motor, and its motor “microcontroller” operates with soft starting and stopping to minimize belt wear — yet it gets up to speed in about 20 seconds. Its open-loop microcontroller enables minor speed adjustments and fine-tuning in real time in eight increments of 0.01 steps. There’s a fun design touch behind the front panel’s speed selection knob — the LED colors are user-selectable.

The Odyssey can accommodate up to three tonearms — it ships with one of them, a unipivot arm with carbon-fiber wand and side stabilization — and the table is made to simplify switching them. “There’s only one thing to remove if you want to replace the tonearm,” Franielczyk told me at the time.

In Room 269 at FLAX, one of the Odyssey table’s two mounted tonearms had a Lyra Delos MC cartridge attached, as seen above. (Benny Audio’s instructions for installing per Löfgren A alignment were posted off to the side.) The rest of the SAS demo system in that room also included an Air Tight step-up transformer and a Western Electric 91 E integrated amp ($11,999; shown below), complete with built-in phono stage and cartridge-related adjustments, that powered some fairly large Odeon Semper horn loudspeakers ($49,900/pr). An AudioQuest Niagara 5000 power conditioner ($5,900) was also in place, and Cardas Audio cables connected the system’s components.

A brief listen to “Ewajo,” from my Tony Allen Blue Note 2LP set from 2017, The Source (LP2, Side D, Track 2), showed many positive attributes — rich-sounding horns and lively, fast percussion from the late master drummer/composer stood out. Bass extension dipped fairly low, though some resonance was detectable, possibly from the cabinets — but no matter. This was a big, full, intense presentation, with pleasing instrumental textures and good three-dimensional impressions.

That’s all for now — Part 3 is coming next!

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 Part 1 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Ken Micallef’s 15-minute video showing all sorts of great turntables and other cool analog gear at FLAX 2025, go here.

For even more FLAX 2025 coverage, go here on our sister site Stereophile.