LATEST ADDITIONS

In addition to having an awesome sounding setup in a smallish room, Simaudio's Lionel Goodfield was putting the final polish on the new Neo MiND. The Neo is a network streamer and music player that supports most PCM formats up to 24/192 and has a variety of output jacks for connection to your DAC. For networking, Bluetooth, ethernet and WiFi is included in addition to a SimLink in and out. Track sample rate and input choice are indicated on the front panel.

As Stereophile's minister without portfolio, my goal was to find something interesting that didn't quite fit into traditional categories. The prize was an introduction, at a Harman demo room in the Hard Rock Casino/Hotel, to Lexicon's SL-1 loudspeaker prototype (price TBD) and the SoundSteer technology that distinguishes it.

Distributor Axiss Audio was showing the new Piega Coax 711 loudspeaker ($25,000/pair). Everything in the speaker—including its coaxial ribbon tweeter/midrange, bass drivers, and all-aluminum enclosure—is designed and manufactured by the Swiss company.

Up and down the CES hallways, in line for coffee, and at every dinner, people kept asking, "Did you go to the MoFi room?…"

Rogue now introduces their first headphone amp/preamplifier, the RH-5 ($2495), which not only looks sleek and timeless in that oval-windowed Rogue way, it features three line-level RCA inputs and one pair of balanced XLR inputs.

Since you'll see the same smiling faces in two successive cable-company blogs, let's start by saying that cables from Crystal Cable and Siltech are made in the same factory, but have very different sounds…

Siltech's Triple Crown power cable (approx. $13,683.40/1.5m at the current exchange rate) is a pure, mono-crystal silver design that uses stabilized air-core insulation and Furutech connectors…