I went to the CAS 2014 yesterday. I find this a very enjoyable show. it can be digested in a day. It seems to have been divided somewhat by the Newport show, but actually I like the manageable nature of the show. The "big monolith" rooms were somewhat absent with some of the usual suspects such as MBL and Vincent MIA, and Wilson had a modest Sasha II room. However, I think this show is great for the "midrange" audiophile who wants to hear impressive systems that are not necessarily in the audiophile stratosphere, and they won't waste a lot of time with the big kahuna systems when they can hear the others. There were a couple of larger systems, like Soundlab, Dynaudio, and Gary's Dragon Jr. and they were very nice, but just a few.
I also was impressed that at least 80 percent of the rooms I visited had really good sound. This is counter intuitive to show experience. I can't say there was a "best" because for show conditions, there were a lot of good ones, many of them different in topology and implementation. Maybe my powers of audio discrimination and bitchiness have diminished so that may be a factor, too, but who knows, I liked a lot of what I heard.
I'm going surfing now, and if I survive, I will post a bit of bad photography and gratuitous remarks when I get back as I go along.