I only spent one day at the show, not even a full day, so I didn't get to every room. And I'm a speaker manufacturer and a dealer so discount my comments accordingly.
The only speaker line I'm commercially affiliated with that was on display was SoundLab, exhibited by their Japanese importer. Unfortunately when they registered for the show they had to take the last room available, and it was exceptionally small with an even smaller usable space. So they were unable to position the SoundLabs far enough out from the front wall. Having done a lot of experimenting with positioning SoundLabs in the course of answering questions from customers over the years, I recognized what I was hearing as "too much early reflections".
Two rooms that stood out to me were the big Estelon room and the Audio Thesis room with the Rosso Fiorentino
"Volterra" speakers. After the show I told my wife I would rank those two rooms "one and two respectively" and she said "so would I".
The Estelon Forzas in their big room pretty much did everything right... natural timbre, relaxing, solid impact, and "you are there" on every recording. I had never heard them before and was apprehensve based on the lower treble emphasis apparent in Stereophile's in-room curves. I'm very sensitive to that and so is my wife; more than once she gave me the quick tap and bolted for the door when a speaker got a bit harsh or shrill on a particular note. But I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER than to trust ungated "in-room response" curves, including Stereophile's! The Estelons actually SOUNDED like their gated on-axis curve and accompanying set of off-axis curves predict.
The Rosso Fiorentio room was one of the small rooms, yet the system managed to convey a very enjoyable "you are there" experience on each recording, which ime is very rare in a small hotel room. In addition the system did not do anything to distract from the sound quality or the spatial quality. Unfailingly natural timbre atop solid bass. We stayed in the room for four or five songs, longer than any other small room, and frankly I kept expecting the next recording to reveal something amiss. That never happened.
The Bella Sound room was using Analysis Audio planar ribbon speakers, and I thought they sounded great (natural timbre, "you are there" [yes that matters a lot to me!], no distractions). But... imo they could have used some subwoofage. And, it was that lack of low-end extension and impact that kept them off my wife's top-few list; she likes very solid bass.
So my wife's third-favorite speakers were fairly-deep-cabinet 6.5" two-way stand-mounts that were played in the Infigo electronics room after the show had closed. I'm friends with the people at Infigo so that's why I was hanging out in their room after hours. My understanding is that this speaker was made in Australia, and I think the owner (who will be manufacturing them, if I heard correctly) wanted to see how they worked with Infigo amps (250 watts, sliding-bias Class A) as part of his due diligence towards becoming an Infigo dealer.
Here's what was so unusual about these speakers, and why the amplification would play a critical role: Their efficiency was only about 78 dB! So they required roughly ten times the amplifier power of typical speakers. But by trading off efficiency (bigtime), what they got in return was arguably jaw-dropping bass response. I think every single person in the room (aside from the person who connected them to the amps and the owner), including me, asked whether there were subwoofers engaged. Nope. Nor were the Aussie speakers one-trick ponies; they sounded balanced and neutral... it's just that they also went deep enough loud enough to induce cognitive dissonance: This was in a ballroom of somewhere around 50,000 cubic feet.
Personally I preferred the Sondheim speakers that had been playing in the Infigo room throughout the show (it was between them and Analysis Audio), but I admit those little Aussie speakers were amazing. I have to guess that speakers and amps were probably being pushed close to their limits, but the system never sounded strained, and none of us heard any clipping. This in a room roughly twenty times the size of a typical home audio room.
