Jason Victor Serinus

Esoteric's N-01 network player ($20,000), which debuted at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in October, is now equipped to decode MQA. It was part of a system that produced very direct, fast sound and that, on LP, rendered Ray Charles' voice with exceptional clarity.

Beautiful and warm sound, gorgeous midrange, absolutely quiet surfaces with silence between the notes—these were some of my impressions upon hearing Natalie Merchant's performance of "The Butcher's Boy," from the LP version of Kronos Quartet's Folk Songs, on this brightly backlit, hard to photograph system from Musical Surroundings.

With Dali and PSB—not to mention NAD and Bluesound—all distributed by Lenbrook, at CES the white Dali Callisto System active tower loudspeakers with SoundHub (target base price $5500/pair, available by early May) sat beside black PSB Imagine T3 speakers ($7499/pair). The Callisto system with SoundHub offers wireless HD audio transfer to the speakers, has numerous inputs including Bluetooth AptX-HD—"you can connect anything" is the claim—multiple outputs, two modular expansion ports, auto sensing source select, and Bluetooth remote control.

With everything about its presentation and packaging proclaiming its intended specialness, Siltech debuted its 35th Anniversary limited-edition Crown Princess interconnects (€3500 for either XLR or RCA terminations)…