The NAMM Show 2025 was held during the fourth week of January 2025 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. This is the biggest show of the year for all who are concerned with any aspect of the music industry. This year, the show had more than 4,300 brands being exhibited by retailers and distributors from more than 125 countries. It is truly a global show by any measure. For 2025, NAMM adopted a new format, where there are now three days of exhibits and five days of events. Unfortunately, this show took place while the wildfires in Los Angeles County continued to burn, but there was a definite unification of spirit along with contribution of funds to support the victims of these disastrous fires.
All aspects of music are covered at this show. Deals are made, education is offered, new and old products are exhibited, specifications are reviewed, ideas for new products are postulated, demonstrations take place, prizes are given away, and live music is played constantly and simultaneously in multiple places throughout the show. The music most definitely begins here at NAMM.
If you’ve never been to NAMM (and you probably haven’t been, given that the show is closed to the general public), trust me when I say it is a mega-assault on all the senses. I’m sure you’ve all heard an orchestra warming up where each musician is playing something different and not in sync with anything else that is being played. Now, multiply that by 100, and throw in another 50 amplified guitars shredding who knows what, along with 30 or 40 drummers drumming whatever comes to mind, with dozens of synthesizers screaming out….and you start to get the auditory picture of what is transpiring at this show. There is plenty of eye candy also, because this show exhibits the types of lights and lasers you might see at any large rock show. Even the olfactory senses are assaulted; more on that later.
All of the NAMM shows throughout the years have been generally similar in theme in that they show thousands of products that are used in the creation, production and support of music in any and all venues: home recording studios, professional recording studios, mastering studios, high school and university band rooms, and in live venues ranging from huge music halls to small coffee shops. This expanded 2025 show was no different in that respect. For this article, I will show some of that, but I will also concentrate on a few of the products exhibited at NAMM which I use all the time in my own recording studio.
Sound reproduction and sound reinforcement are important if you expect your audience to successfully hear your music or if you expect to track it, mix it or master it accurately. I’d have to say that these Utopia Main studio monitors (on the left) from Focal were absolutely astounding in fidelity, precision and power. They were the best of all the monitors I listened to in this (understandably) audibly-compromised NAMM venue. I would love to have a set of these in my living room, after which I would be quickly thrown out of the neighborhood permanently. The systems range from $29,999 to $49,999 per pair, which includes dedicated power amplifiers.
Space is usually at a premium in home studios, and monitors are usually set up in what is known as a near-field arrangement. Home studio near-field speakers are set up about 36 inches apart, and the studio engineer’s head completes the equilateral triangle, being about 36 inches from each speaker. When listening to the speakers in a small home studio space, this arrangement serves to minimize the sonic contributions from the room (which are most always unwanted reflections and other room problems that compromise the sound). These speakers were an interesting approach, with the low-frequency driver operating mostly as an infinite baffle.
This isn’t a community habitat for miniature barn owls. Whether you are recording and mixing in a home studio or a professional one, you are going to require some room treatment to tame sound anomalies generated when the sound interacts with the walls, floor and ceiling of that room. The random location of holes in this studio wall treatment serves to break up standing waves in the room, while keeping the sound lively and bright instead of dead and dull.
In any studio, you want the monitored sound to be as flat as possible so that you don’t make any mixing or mastering decisions based on an anomaly that the room (or headphone set) is contributing. The reason for this is that if the room dimensions provide a big boost at 100 Hz, for example, you might be tempted to equalize that 100 Hz boost out of the song you are mixing, when in reality, that 100 Hz boost is not going to appear in most any other music system to which people are listening. All of a sudden, you have a mix that is compromised at 100 Hz. This product is called SoundID Reference from Sonarworks, and it is one that I use on every song I produce.
To use it, you first implement a calibrated microphone to measure the response of the room at your mixing position, which is what the woman in the above photo is doing. The SoundID then uses some sophisticated software to correct the anomalous frequency and phase issues that are present so that the response is flat at the listening position, and the room contribution is completely removed. You install this DSP software as a plug in inside of your digital mixer (a digital audio workstation or DAW), and it corrects the audio response to be flat in your room at that position. This software also works with headphones, and Sonarworks provides correction templates for almost all of the various headphones that audio engineers commonly use. Sonarworks can also custom-characterize your own personal headphones if you send them in for measurement.
Here is a screenshot of what the SoundID Reference plugin looks like when it is inserted as the last plugin on my mixer’s Master Bus. This particular shot shows that I am using my monitor system consisting of a pair of Sapphire Audio SB speakers and a Velodyne F-1000 subwoofer. I can use this plugin for my monitor system or for any of the headphones that I have in the studio to achieve a flat response.
If you look at the waveforms in the center of the plugin, the purple squiggly ones are the measured response of my studio room in June 2022 as determined by the calibrated microphone with the SoundID Reference Measurement software. It has a huge dip at 80 Hz due to the room dimensions. The two magenta waveforms that looks like straight lines along the 0 dB axis are the corrected responses of my left and right monitors after SoundID Reference gets done fixing them. They are almost perfectly flat right down to 25 Hz, allowing me to make informed mixing decisions without being affected by room resonances and anomalies.
Here is a 24-inch subwoofer from Celestion; you won’t see many of these in a home recording studio. This one was playing a 2 Hz sine wave! No humans could hear it, of course.
Artificial intelligence is starting to come on strong in the music industry. Now you can generate lyrics, music and singers from simple AI data inputs! It’s hard to say if this is going to result in better music; the jury is still out on that. My personal guess would be a big no.
Here is one demo I attended showing how AI can be used in real time to generate and then modify a song. The exhibitor provided lyrics (for the vocals) and MIDI data (for the score) into the computer. The AI took over, generated the music using internal instruments, and then “sang” the vocals using data that was characterized by a female singer. The exhibitor then clicked on the lyrics and changed them around from “I’ll be your songbird” to “I’ll be your winter song.” He changed a couple of the notes the singer was singing, and then he completely changed the singer to be some other AI woman! All of this in real time as I stood there. So, be aware that what you’ll be hearing on the radio in the future might not be any real band playing or any particular real person singing. Ready or not, here comes AI.
I want to show you a highly impressive piece of software DSP exhibited at NAMM called Melodyne by a company named Celemony out of Germany. This is another piece of software I use on most every song in the studio, and it has rightfully earned a technical Grammy for this invention. It can be used on a recording of any instrument, but it really rises to the occasion on vocal tracks. The above is a screenshot of a vocal track that was recorded and then fed into Melodyne. The software analyzes the audio in non-real time, determines the pitch and timing information of the vocal track, and then displays it as a series of “blobs” on a score sheet (“blob” is what Celemony actually calls them).
Each blob is a word the vocalist sang. The location vertically on the page shows which note pitch that word is (even if it is way off in relation to perfect pitch), and the flow of time is left to right on the screen. The little squiggles within the blob show the pitch fluctuations of the vocalist’s voice on that particular word sung. The magic of Melodyne is that you can manipulate any of those blobs in many ways, largely without artifacts. You can change the pitch, correct slightly flat or sharp singing, pull the beginning and the end of the word earlier or later in time, line up the vocals from multiple singers, split the word and make it two or more different pitches, and increase or decrease the amount of pitch fluctuations within the word – and I’m just getting started. When you first work with Melodyne, you will be slack-jawed at the power of this software to manipulate audio and make it sound as if it was like that all along. Check out some Melodyne Studio demos on YouTube to be amazed.
If you weren’t aware that tone is everything to today’s electric guitarist, then let me clue you in: tone is everything. And the exhibitors know that to be true, because there were guitar pedals as far as the eye can see. Not just the standard compression, distortion, EQ, chorus and echo pedals, but plenty of other selections, especially in the part of the show where the so-called boutique stomp boxes reside.
Let’s take a look at some of the instruments on display at NAMM 2025. This is a huge modular synthesizer from Synthesizers.com. It is similar to the huge modulars that Moog offered in the 1960s and 1970s. All of the modules are wired together by the synthesist through the use of patch cords to create almost any particular sound. You have to be a hard-core synthesist to wrestle with this instrument, not only to learn it and use it, but also to physically move it!
These are the easily-identifiable and highly popular red keyboards from Nord of Sweden.
German company Behringer has been busy creating modern -day equivalents of some of the most iconic (but long out of production) synthesizers from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. They just came out with their UB-Xa synthesizer, which mimics the classic Oberheim OB-Xa. This is sure to be a hit.
Behringer also exhibited this new BX1 synthesizer, which appears to replicate the rare Yamaha DX-1 synthesizer. It looks to be a mixture of Yamaha DX-1 components married to Yamaha CS-80 synth features, which might make it quite a popular instrument when it gets released. There was no price, but one of Behringer’s long-time goals has been to offer a highly affordable product to the masses.
This is the new Kurzweil K2061. Kurzweil also showed the new K2088 which is basically the same thing only with an 88-key keyboard instead of 61 keys. I have several of the K20xx-series synthesizers, and I love them, so I am interested to learn more about these two keyboards.
How about orchestral and band instruments? You wouldn’t believe how many were on display at the NAMM 2025 show. Here is just a smattering of what was on display there.
Hofner was showing their venerable Beatles-style “violin” basses.
You couldn’t walk a few steps without running into a live performance. Remember what I said about the auditory assault? Yep. Here are just a very small few of the live performances.
A flamenco guitarist and dancer! Playing right next to this guy below! That’s NAMM.
I’d have to say I was totally floored by this guy playing a dual-necked guitar, and by the way, playing both necks at the same time. He was playing hammer-on chords with his left hand, and then simultaneously playing a completely different lead line with his right hand using a finger-tapping technique. And to top it off, he couldn’t even see either fretboard because his hair was down in front of his eyes. He was in a groove, for sure.
No NAMM show would be complete without an appearance by Stevie Wonder. He came into the booth I was in with his gigantic entourage surrounding him. I managed to snap this picture. There are many musical celebrities at NAMM giving demos, conducting roundtable discussions, playing live music, or just walking around the exhibits, like Stevie here.
Martin Guitars had this beauty in a locked display case. This represents their 3,000,000th dreadnaught-style acoustic guitar! The top is made from Adirondack spruce, and the back and sides are Brazilian 3osewood. Only 30 of these were made, and the price tag is $300,000 if you’d like to score one for yourself. Just check out the work on the neck of the guitar.
Talk about being in the right place to sell ear protection. This is like selling ice cream cones in the desert.
NAMM 2025 had a custom guitar showcase with some truly outstanding instruments. Really, they are just works of art. Here are a few more guitars and basses.
Of course, when you get right down to it, you can make a guitar out of pretty much anything, even an ancient Sunoco Motor Oil can.
And you can make an amplifier out of pretty much anything, as this one from Tiki Tube Amps demonstrates. The company offers stereo hi-fi amps and each one is handmade and one of a kind.
Remember at the beginning of this report when I said that NAMM is an assault on ALL of the senses? You can add these various essences into sprays and fog machines to make the concert hall smell like whatever you want it to smell like. But one of the essences they had really made me wonder.
Why would you want to make your concert hall smell like a fish market I’m not sure…maybe to play to all the cool cats out there. But I am sure about this: if you were looking for something, anything related to the music industry, you were sure to find it at NAMM 2025.
About the author: John J. Volanski is an audio, electrical, and systems engineer living in Southern California. He is author of the book Sound Recording Advice. He spends many relaxing hours playing around in his home studio…plus a few non-relaxing hours walking around NAMM 2025.
