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The Elac FS 609 XP-1 is a speaker that has intrigued me since I first saw it, but somehow never got a chance to listen to it. On the Friday, my first day at FSI, I was in the room where they had a pair of these speakers, but, wouldn't you know it, they were not the ones being played. Then, on Sunday morning, I saw Vince Scalzitti, the importer, and said "Vince, do you by any chance..." but he didn't let me finish. "You want to hear the bigger Elacs, right? They're playing in the room next door." And indeed they were. Demo'd by the genial Jack Bakerdjian of Audio Gallery, a Toronto Elac dealer, the FS 609 XP-1 (catchy name, what?) driven by Korato tube electronics sounded quite promising, with a very spacious sound, even though the room was almost certainly too small for them. The FS 609 XP-1 ($17,000) uses an improved version of the famous Heil driver, with an omnidirectional supertweeter on top.

No show report can be considered complete without at least one picture of an esoteric tube amplifier, and I wouldn't want to break with this tradition. The Wavac HE 833Ver 1.3 is the stripped-down version of the $350,000/pair SH-833 that was <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/704wavac">reviewed by Michael Fremer</A> and caused some readers apoplexy. This one is a mere $140,000/pair, the lower price reflecting less elaborate power supplies. A bargain, I'm telling you! I have no reason to believe that this would measure any better than the one reviewed by Mikey, but I must say that the sound of the Verity Lohengrins driven by these amps, using a dCS digital source, was&mdash;apart from some bass softness, which could even have been room-related-absolutely terrific, certainly one of the best sounds at the show. Go figure.

The most expensive system at the show, costing about US$200,000, was this all-McIntosh system, based on two of the company's three-chassis monoblock amplifiers, their four-chassis preamplifier, and their speakers with too many drive-units to count. (Okay, there are 110 per channel&mdash;40 tweeters, 64 midrange units, and six woofers!)

"Business, and art, went on like this for years, fleecing the rich.

If you're an audiophile, that probably means you have tons of music that needs proper storage. So how do you do it? Do you have racks, shelves, boxes, drawers, or do you put it all on a hard disk and stick the original discs in the garage?

Last week, www.stereophile.com posted an article concerning Pollara, Inc.'s Canadian Recording Industry Association&ndash;commissioned <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/032006cria/">144-page report</A> on the downloading habits of Canadian music consumers. We reported that the University of Ottawa's Dr. Michael Geist interpreted the Pollara data <A HREF="http://michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1168/I…; than the polling group did, in particular noting his conclusion that people who had downloaded music had legally purchased more music than their counterparts who had never done so.

The German Canton line of speakers has a new flagship: the Vento Reference 1 DC ($30,000). Looking closely at these beautifully finished speakers, I noticed that in the back panel of each the speaker there were about a dozen signatures. Could it be that some FSI visitors have been engaging in some audiophile graffiti? No. These are the signatures of the speaker's designers, including Canton's chief engineer Frank G&#246;bl, and the people who built these specific speakers. I really like that.