NAMM Show 2026 marks 125 years and doubles as a pro-audio venue

The NAMM Show held its 2026 edition at the Anaheim Convention Center in January, marking 125 years since the event began. It is formally a fair for the musical instrument retail trade, but its pro-audio side has grown steadily, especially since 2017, when a $190 million hall for the category was added to the venue. Coming a few months after an AES Show in Long Beach that was widely seen as weak, NAMM carried extra weight this year as a place to present pro-audio products.

Microphones and wireless

• Shure showed the new SLX-D+ wireless systems, available in many rack-mount and portable configurations with a choice of microphones. It also introduced the KSM40C condenser, which uses a 1-inch capsule, a proprietary backplate design intended to control diaphragm resonances, and a uniform cardioid pattern meant to reduce room sound and bleed.
• Voyage Audio presented its Spatial Mic line, including the Dante-enabled model that decodes directly to 5.1.2 surround and records 32-bit/192 kHz audio. The company also updated its spatial audio converter plugins, adding surround output and further DSP setups.
• Wisycom launched the MPR60 wideband in-ear receiver, which covers 470-800 MHz, 940-960 MHz STL in the U.S. and 1240-1260 MHz globally in one unit. The company also released the MATF antenna matrix, which handles RF and fiber, merges several rack components into one box and combines up to eight RF zones in diversity with 8:4 or dual 4:2 outputs.

Intercom, networking and consoles

Clear-Com once more supplied the intercom for the Yamaha Grand Plaza Stage, running its Arcadia Central Station with FreeSpeak Icon and FreeSpeak II beltpacks, the new four-channel HelixNet beltpack, V-Series IrisX panels, LQ Series interfaces and Gen-IC Virtual Intercom. Dante held three days of free training on its platform, Controller, Virtual Soundcard and Director, plus networking topics. Lawo showed mc²56 consoles and its HOME platform and apps, and SSL presented the Oracle Active Analogue console with full analog recall and the UMD192 USB-to-MADI and Dante interface with 192 channels of I/O.