LATEST ADDITIONS

I'd gone into the DCM room at the end of the day to hear the speaker manufacturer's new Time Frame TFE200 three-way tower, which can be seen at the left of the photo. Using two 6.5" woofers and a midrange mounted above the tweeter, the TFE200 offers a lot of speaker engineering for just $1000/pair. But following my audition of the speakers, driven by Jolida CD player and tube monoblocks, connected with Esoteric USA cables, we were treated to a concert by singer-songwriter Herman Hogan. Al Congdon, the VP of DCM parent company Mitek's Consumer Electronics Group, had heard Hogan playing in a Long Beach coffee house, and liked what he heard. He invited Hogan to perform in the DCM room at CES. You can't beat that live music!

Ever listen to a system costing $340,288? Ray Kimber's IsoMike venture put on such an exhibit at CES to preview their DSD recordings with "no limiting, no compression, no mixing, and no equalization." They had their SACD Hybrid Stereo/4-channel discs next door for sale.

What does $275,000 buy you these days besides a used Porsche Carrera GT with 20,000 miles on it? Yes, there is now a loudspeaker system with that asking price, which gets you 900 lbs of hardware, including two midrange—tweeter towers, two subwoofers, and two subwoofer amplifiers. Frequency response is rated from 8Hz to 50kHz, and the minimal load impedance is 3 ohms. Furthermore, the Force is made of glass.

Although Allen Perkins' Spiral Groove has until now focused exclusively on analog products, the company has taken a big step into the digital domain by announcing the forthcoming Spiral Groove DP1 line stage preamp and 24/96 DAC. Projected to become available in four months, the DPI is so new that it has yet to be priced.

In the Loiminchay room, I listened to the standmounted Degas loudspeakers (starting at $15,000/pair). Designer Patrick Chu was a painter before he starting building loudspeakers, and finds inspiration in his favorite artists. He named his smallest loudspeaker after the French Impressionist whose paintings, Chu says, are "romantic and musical." Other Loiminchay speakers include the $35,000 Chagall and top-of-the-line $45,500 Kandinsky.

Franc Kuzma was showing a fascinating tonearm, the $7300–7500 4Point, named because it has unique vertical and horizontal bearings. Kuzma said, "It's like a unipivot tonearm that can't 'chatter' in the horizontal plane."

Poor Kevin Halverson! Since Hesiod only named nine muses in <I>Theogony</I>, Kevin has had to double up as Muse's line of players has increased. The Erato II is available as a transport ($5300) or one-box CD/DVD/DVD-A player ("up to" $7300).