Robert Deutsch

Victor Khomenko, the "VK" of Balanced Audio Technology's VK-5 preamp and VK-60 amplifier, was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), and grew up two blocks from the Svetlana tube factory. He attended the prestigious Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and received an M.S. in physics and electronics, specializing in electronic emissions. He spent his early working life in the Russian electronics industry, then emigrated to the US in 1979—with $400, a family, no home, and no job.

With the speakers removed, you can see the inductive bases on the dock.

It's hard to know what the best strategy is for digital upgrades. Maybe you bought your first CD player when you became convinced that the format was going to succeed, and it seemed that players were about as good as they were going to get. Some time later, you tried one of the new outboard digital processors, and the sonic improvement was such that you just had to have it. Then you replaced the player itself with a CD transport, so you could benefit from improvements in servo control and digital output circuitry. At this point you were generally happy with your digital front-end—until you read about how 16-bit DACs (which is what your processor had) were old hat now that 20-bit DACs were available. But alas, your processor couldn't be upgraded, and was worth maybe 30% of what you'd paid for it. So you took a loss and bought a new-generation digital processor, and things were fine and dandy...for a while.

"What did you think of the Sonus Faber/Ayre system?" I always feel like I'm being put on the spot when being asked this kind of question, and I usually say something vaguely positive but noncommittal. "Um, it sounded nice." I had listened to that system only briefly at that point, and had just a general favorable impression. I went back later, listened some more, and came to the conclusion that this was one of the most natural-sounding systems at the show. Not loud and spectacular in an obvious way, just "natural." But then I don't think I've ever heard a non-musical-sounding Sonus Faber speaker, and these Amati anniversarios (to be reviewed by John Atkinson in the May issue of Stereophile) were perfectly complemented by Ayre C-5xe universal disc player (Stereophile's Joint Product of 2005), K-1xe preamp and V-1xe power amp.