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We got to talking to Bel Canto's John Stronczer and he pulled us into an empty conference room to talk. "I did something interesting," Stronczer said.

Jeff Joseph was demoing his RM7<I>si</I> compact monitors ($2300/pr) with Bel Canto's 150Wpc 3001 integrated amp ($2200) to spectacular effect. Why was that surprising? Because his source was an iBook laptop feeding a usb output into the 300i.

Jeff Wong (left) and Ken Kessler compare mustache waxes at the Classic Records event.

Hyperion Sound Design's Albert Wu holds up his SVF midrange driver. It's quite a piece of work. It has no spider, incorporates what Wu calls "rear pressure reduction," and the flat-carbon fiber plate that I took for a dust cap is really the transducer.

The HT845 single-ended monoblock amplifiers ($2500/ea) were so new, Hyperion had no literature on them. They looked and sounded good, though.

Proclaim Audioworks' Dan Herrington had a revelation one day while sitting in the smallest room of his house. "I was reading old <I>JAES</I> papers," he said, "when I read a measured analysis of speaker radiation patterns based on cabinet construction. A sphere was extraordinarily close to the perfect form, but then you had to deal with using multiple drivers."

Verity Audio had Nagra's CDP CD Player ($13,495) driving its P-LP line stage ($11,495) and pyramidal PMA mono amplifiers ($10,995/pr)&mdash;all connected with Silversmith Audio Palladium interconnects ("starting at $4000/pair). At the other end was a pair of Parsifal Ovation loudspeakers ($19,495/pair).