CanJam NYC 2026 & the Rebirth of Physical Media: Editor’s Round-Up

Personal audio is no longer some gateway drug into traditional hi-fi. It is the drug. The energy, crowds, and money are here. And judging by the number of legacy high-end brands still trying to figure out how to get into the category, the window may already be closing. The companies already in the pool are doing very well. The ones still standing on the deck trying to appeal to Mrs. Wheeler might want to find a towel. Fast.

Now that CanJam NYC 2026 is in the rearview mirror, that reality feels even clearer.

What unfolded over the weekend inside that packed hotel ballroom wasn’t just another headphone meet. It was a very visible reminder that personal audio has become one of the most dynamic, and crowded corners of the entire hi-fi industry.

This wasn’t a niche gathering of a few hundred die-hards swapping cables and arguing about burn-in. The lines outside the ballroom doors early Saturday morning told a different story. Hundreds of people were already queued up before the doors opened, waiting for the chance to hear the latest headphones, IEMs, DACs, and amplifiers. That kind of turnout doesn’t happen unless the category has real momentum. When thousands show up, it’s time to accept that we’re living in two very different worlds right now in the high-end audio segment.

Credit where it’s due.

The team behind the CanJam Global series knows exactly what it’s doing. Jude Mansilla and Ethan Opolion have spent more than a decade turning what began as a relatively small headphone gathering into some of the most focused and consistently packed audio events anywhere on the calendar.

Not every stop along the way has been a home run. That’s the reality of ever growing event series. But the level of interest in personal audio has never been higher, and a large portion of that momentum can be traced directly back to the ecosystem built around CanJam Global and Head-Fi.

After spending two days walking those rooms in New York, the conclusion feels unavoidable.

Personal audio isn’t the gateway to hi-fi anymore.

For a lot of people walking through those doors, it is hi-fi.

The Good

The enthusiasm at CanJam NYC 2026 was impossible to miss. Packed rooms. Long listening lines. People carrying Pelican cases full of IEMs like they were transporting crown jewels. Personal audio might be the most obsessive corner of the hobby right now, but it’s also one of the most energized.

That said, a little personal space wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

There’s a certain breed of attendee who believes the correct way to audition a $3,000 pair of headphones is to hover six inches behind the person already listening. Close enough to fog up the back of your neck. As if the pressure alone will somehow convince you to wrap it up. Five minutes into a track and they’re shifting their weight like TSA agents who missed lunch. Relax. The headphones will still be here when I’m done.

My Saturday started well before any of that.

5 a.m. alarm. Quick shower and shave. Irish Spring for the win. Walk the dog in the dark while staring down the neighborhood red fox that has apparently decided my dog looks like breakfast. Bad decision. Tyrion would tear this furry idiot apart and turn it into a winter jacket.

Bagel run. Coffee run. Daven. Walk to the train station.

Thanks to the ongoing Portal Bridge construction project, NJ Transit has been doing its best to remind those of us living south of Newark that patience is a virtue. My commute from the Jersey Shore into Penn Station clocked in at about 100 minutes. Plenty of time to stare out the window, drink mediocre coffee, read the news from Israel, and think about headphones.

All of this before 7 a.m. on what might have been the nicest Saturday morning in the tri-state in two months.

Because the winter that just crawled out of this region wasn’t some mild seasonal inconvenience. We’re talking snow measured in feet, weeks of frozen tundra that would have looked perfectly at home on Hoth, and winds ripping off the Atlantic like they were personally offended that anyone still lived along the Jersey Shore.

And judging by the crowd already gathering outside the ballroom doors when I arrived, I wasn’t the only one willing to wake up early for this show.

What showed up in New York was serious hardware. Flagship headphones pushing well past the $5,000 mark. Electrostatics that require dedicated energizers. DACs and portable amplifiers with engineering that would have been considered state of the art in traditional two-channel systems not that long ago. The performance ceiling keeps moving higher, and the companies building this gear clearly understand that their audience is paying attention.

Then there were the IEM tables.

An insane number of them.

Everywhere you looked there were cases full of wired in-ear monitors. Universal fits. Custom demos. Multi-driver designs that look like miniature spacecraft. Some companies had entire tables dedicated just to different variations of their flagship IEM lines. It wasn’t just a handful of boutique builders either—established brands and newer players were all leaning heavily into the category.

If anyone still thinks wired IEMs are some niche side hustle inside personal audio, they probably didn’t walk the floor at CanJam this weekend.

And the crowds kept coming.

One of the most impressive things about CanJam NYC 2026 was the constant flow of people moving through the show. Not just a big opening rush and then a slow taper. Waves. All day.

Which is even more remarkable when you consider the location. The hotel sits right in the middle of Times Square, arguably one of the most chaotic intersections of humanity on the planet. Outside the doors you’ve got tourists staring at LED billboards the size of aircraft carriers, Elmos asking for tips, and someone selling $12 hot dogs that probably violate several international treaties.

And inside?

Thousands of people quietly listening to headphones.

Only in New York could you walk out of a room filled with $6,000 electrostatic headphones and immediately get run over by a guy in a Spider-Man costume holding a margarita the size of a fire extinguisher and chanting for the Ayatollah.

The Bad

Not everything about CanJam NYC 2026 was perfect.

The biggest absence was impossible to ignore.

CanJam Honcho Ethan Opolion wasn’t there.

Ethan was stuck at home in Israel because of the ongoing war between America, Israel, and Iran, which made international travel impossible. That’s a tough break for someone who has been a constant presence at these shows since the beginning. In fact, this was the first CanJam he’s missed since the series launched nearly a decade ago.

Considering how much work Ethan and Jude Mansilla put into organizing these events, his absence was definitely felt.

There were also a few notable no-shows.

Focal and Naim didn’t make an appearance this year. That raised a few eyebrows at first, but we now know the reason. They were in the middle of the Barco acquisition, which likely pushed a headphone show in Times Square a little further down the priority list.

Still, their absence was noticeable.

Another surprise was the lack of a presence from Headphones.com, which has become one of the most influential retailers in the personal audio space.

A couple of companies also showed up with smaller footprints than usual.

Dan Clark Audio and Schiit Audio both had scaled-back tables compared to previous years. That was a bit of a bummer. Both companies usually bring a larger spread of gear and draw a steady crowd throughout the day.

And while there was plenty of excellent equipment on display, I’ll be honest about something else.

I didn’t walk away feeling like I had witnessed a lot of earth-shattering innovation.

That doesn’t mean the show lacked interesting products. Far from it.

Companies like Grell, iFi, Chord, Meze Audio, Grado, and HiFiMAN all had new gear worth hearing. Some of it sounded fantastic. Some of it pushed design ideas forward in smaller, incremental ways.

But nothing made me want to sell my firstborn son to the Dothraki as payment and spend the rest of my days beyond the Wall trapped in a frozen hut with Cersei.

And this is only the first part of the “bad.” There’s more.

More of the Bad

Another thing that stood out to me this year had less to do with gear and more to do with the crowd itself.

Having attended CanJams before there even were CanJams; back when they were basically Head-Fi meets, I’ve been genuinely impressed by how the demographics have evolved over the years.

Those early events were…let’s call them special.

Picture small headphone gatherings in dingy hotel mini-ballrooms. The kind of rooms where nobody would ever admit to having their Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah, or Communion, mostly because the catering trays looked like they came from the “we have glass for a reason” Chinese restaurant next door. A lot of folding tables. Extension cords everywhere. And a crowd that skewed heavily toward white and Asian single or married men who could spend three hours debating driver metallurgy without coming up for oxygen.

Fast forward to the past few CanJam NYC events and the shift had been pretty noticeable.

Still plenty of guys. This is hi-fi after all. But there were far more women in attendance. Women of different ages, backgrounds, and cultures. Some attending with partners. Some clearly there on their own. Young professionals who can absolutely afford this gear. Couples sharing listening sessions. Music lovers who were just as curious about the newest IEM or headphone amplifier as anyone else in the room.

But CanJam NYC 2026 felt a little different.

The crowd this year seemed to tilt back toward the more traditional male-heavy demographic. Plenty of White, Asian, African American, Indian, and Hispanic attendees, but overwhelmingly men of all shapes and sizes. Perhaps even a few too many of the white-haired older audiophiles who make hi-fi shows so inspiring about the future of the hobby.

There was still a lot of youth in the room, which is great. That’s been one of the more encouraging developments at recent CanJam events. Younger listeners discovering personal audio, building systems, and actually caring about sound quality instead of whatever algorithm Spotify decides to shove into their ears that day.

But when the old guard starts showing up in droves, and that includes the older generation of hi-fi journalists born before the Nixon administration…some even before Kennedy, you have to wonder what it really means.

Is that growth?

Or just the same crowd discovering a new category of gear to argue about?

There were women at the show. Absolutely.

But having attended the past four NYC CanJams, this one definitely felt like it had fewer women in attendance than recent years. Whether that’s just a one-year anomaly or something else entirely is hard to say.

Still, it was noticeable.

Something else has been quietly happening alongside the explosion in personal audio.

Physical media is coming back.

Not in some ironic, retro, nostalgia cosplay kind of way. Not because a handful of aging collectors refuse to move on. What I’m observing, both at shows like CanJam and out in the real world is something broader.

It’s multi-generational.

Young listeners discovering vinyl for the first time. Film fans hunting down UHD 4K Blu-rays because streaming services keep editing or removing the movies they want to watch. Readers buying physical books because staring at another glowing rectangle after ten hours of work feels like a punishment, not a reward.

And for some of us, it never really left.

I’ve been buying and collecting books, movies, and music for more than 50 years. It’s not a hobby. It’s part of how my brain works.

Just how important?

I turned 56 last week.

My family offered to buy me hockey tickets as a birthday gift. Given how the Devils and Rangers have been performing lately, tickets are suddenly a lot easier to come by as the NHL season winds down. Normally that would have been an easy “yes.” I’ve played hockey most of my life. I still follow the league obsessively. My brain stores NHL statistics the way other people remember their kids’ birthdays.

But I said no.

What did I want instead?

Books. Movies. Music.

Better than a game. Better than a new watch. Better than just about anything else they could have wrapped in a box.

Because physical media does something that streaming never will.

It stimulates the brain.

The ritual of picking a record. Pulling a disc off the shelf. Opening a book and feeling the paper between your fingers. Your mind engages differently. The senses fire in ways that a scrolling app menu simply can’t replicate.

Streaming is convenient. I use it every day.

But it doesn’t stimulate my brain or frankly my loins, the way physical music does.

And before someone says it, yes, eReaders have their place. I know that better than most. I helped Barnes & Noble launch the Nook between 2009 and 2011. The technology solved real problems and made reading more accessible for a lot of people.

But nothing compares to a physical book.

Not ever.

To sit and read next to the most glorious blonde space princess in the galaxy. To fall asleep watching a movie together pulled from the collection. That’s the dream. Always has been.

And judging by what I’m seeing in record stores, bookstores, from boutique film labels, and the listening habits of younger audiences discovering this stuff for the first time…

I suspect I’m not alone.

Related Reading:

• Best In Show At CanJam NYC 2026: The Headphones, DACs, Amps, And IEMs Everyone Was Fighting To Hear
• Jazz Dispensary At 10, Integrators In The Keys, Wireless Headphones On The Road, Catherine O’Hara, And Sinners Leading The Pack: Editor’s Round-Up
• Culture Wars At The Super Bowl, Meze STRADA’s Curious Tuning, Record Store Day 2026, Hi-Fi Show Overload?: Editor’s Round-Up
• Paramount Wins Warner Bros Battle, Purim, Qobuz Goes To War On AI, Robert Duvall, And Empire Ears Goes Kaput: Editor’s Round-Up
• All CanJam NYC 2026 Coverage