Jason Victor Serinus

Voxativ may be one of the only companies in the high-end whose equipment list is designed as a flow chart. The visual presentation seems entirely apt, given how beautifully music flowed through the eye-catching and soul-pleasing Voxativ 9.87 system loudspeakers with its AC-4d wideband driver and bass extension ($34,900/pair).

Welcome to the first GoldenEar loudspeaker completely redesigned by AudioQuest since the cable company bought the speaker company. Re-envisioned and realized by a US/Canadian team headed by Garth Powell, the T66 ($6900/pair in black or $7200/pair in red) will hopefully become available in either August or September. It contains a folded-ribbon AMT tweeter, two MVPP, cast-basket, passive midrange drivers, and two active long-throw, DSP-controlled oval subwoofers powered by 1200W class-D amplifiers. Passive quadratic planar radiators are located on each side of the speaker. It goes without saying that internal wiring is by AudioQuest.

Aesthetix's Jim White (above right), along with the company's distributor, Garth Leerer of Musical Surroundings, showed off the new, Aesthetix Saturn Atlas Eclipse monoblock amplifier ($25,000/pair). An evolution of a product first launched 10 years ago, the Saturn Atlas Eclipse sports super-matched output devices that effectively lower noise by 40%.

Although the Valve Amplification Company (VAC) system at CES 2016 was virtually identical to the one I blogged at RMAF last October, save for the shrouded TV or mirror, there was a world of difference in the sound. VAC's Kevin Hayes attributed the improvement to a change in tubes in the VAC Phi 170 IQ master preamplifiers ($9900). While the tubes at the earlier show were Russian Gold Lion KT-88, here they were Chinese Shuguang KT-88SC. The sound on the Mahler 9 SACD I played at CES was very, very beautiful.