When John Atkinson requested that I check out the new state-of-the-art Sennheiser HD 800 headphones ($1399.95), which will debut next month, I dreaded descending into the madness of the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Little did I know that instead of encountering an impossible throng of tech-crazed computer geeks, I would have my peak sonic experience of CES 2009.
Sam Laufer of Laufer Teknik has become the US manufacturer and distributor of Bybee Wire and the distributor of the Bybee Power Purifier ($4500) that is manufactured by Transparent. Here he's pictured holding the new Bybee wire, which contains the equivalent of three Bybee Golden Goddess Speaker Bullets. While I haven't tried the wire, I have two sets of Bullets on each of my reference speaker inputs, and am continually startled by their ability to clarify and refine low-level bass detail. I never, ever thought I could get this much bass clarity from my speakers, especially from closely spaced, multiple parallel lines of double basses and cellos.
"We are your one-stop shop for cables and tweaks," proclaimed Joseph Cohen of The Lotus Group, while leading me through two rooms filled products. Even the new products took up two pages of notes. Through it all, I remained extremely jealous of legendary mastering engineer Steve Hoffman, who had settled onto a couch in front of the fabulous Feastrex $55,000/pair speakers, and was blissfully tapping his foot to the extremely realistic, full-range sound of a jazz combo playing back on a A Feastrex modified EMT studio type CD player with outboard line transformer.
Somewhere in the maze of air-walled convention cells in the Sands, I stumbled upon PSC Audio's Pure Silver Connection cable. Handmade in Perth, Australia using the finest, purest Australian silver one can find—6Ns, or 99.99997% pure—each cable receives three to six annealing heating and cooling treatments (without cryogenically freezing) to increase the length of silver crystals, thereby increasing conductivity by 20% over untreated silver.
Montreal-based company Verity has been slowly building a reputation for sound quality with its unique speakers, which combine a conventional head-unit on-top a woofer module that, unusually, mounts the drivers on its rear. CES saw the launch of two new models, the Leonore ($15,995/pair) and Finn ($5995/pair). Both speakers offer high sensitivities in the low 90s, and while the Leonore produced an impressive sound from Keith Jarrett's <I>Live at Carnegie Hall</I> CD powered by Nagra's forthcoming MSA stereo amp that Wes Phillips blogged about earlier, I was also impressed by the more affordable, one-box Finn, which was demmed with Nagra's PMA "pyramid" amps. The rest of the system included a Basis Debut turntable and Vector 4 tonearm, Nagra PLL preamp and Nagra's new battery-powered BPS phono stage, which I am sure Mikey Fremer will be reviewing in the near future.
I had been impressed by the Prince V2 speakers from Hansen Audio, when Wes Phillips <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/408hansen/">reviewed it</A> for <I>Stereophile</I> a few months back. (Mikey Fremer has written a follow-up for our forthcoming March 2009 issue.) But the 2009 CES was my first chance to hear the Canadian manufacturer's top-line King V2 speaker ($89,000/pair). Powered by CAT amplification, with Stealth cables, the LP of Louis Armstrong's classic performance of "St. James Infirmary" produced a big sweep of sound, with superbly natural tonalities and extended lows, though you could also hear that Hansen's Wes Bender had played this LP a few too many times over the decades!
Wes Phillips gave me the tip. "You must check out the Sonicweld room. Their active Pulserod system uses the DEQX digital crossover." So I checked it out. Comprising two 4'-tall Pulserod towers and two Subpulse subwoofers, the system costs $110,000 but includes all amplification—three 200W class-D ICE modules for the upper-range drivers in each tower and a1.1kW class-D amp for each 15" subwoofer—the crossover module, cables, and even a remote control.
The name "Loiminchay" comes from a line of high-end pens, I am told, and the prices of the superbly finished Loiminchay speakers are also high-end, the three-way Chagall pictured here coming in at $48,500/pair. But combining a 30mm diamond tweeter with ceramic-cone midrange and LF units in two multi-layer Birch-ply enclosures with a concrete plinth, the Chagall produced smooth, extended sound driven by a Bel Canto class-D power amp and a Nagra CD player.
Perhaps it was the ridiculously expensive 20Wpc Lars tube amplifiers that Wes Phillips blogged about yesterday, but the modest-looking Prio 620 speakers (price starting at $5750/pair) from Finnish manufacturer Amphion, sounded both sweet and powerful on a track from bassist Brian Bromberg. The titanium-dome tweeter is loaded with Amphion's proprietary waveguide, which matches its dispersion above the low 1.2kHz crossover frequency to that of the twin 6.5" paper-cone woofers.
CES is traditionally where new brands come to find US distribution, and the room next to <I>Stereophile</I>'s at the Venetian featured some well-finished and good-sounding speakers from Croatian company Audio Epilog, which they shared with Czech tube amp manufacturer KR. (Dig those humongous tubes!) The two-way Cocoa2 should sell for between $7000/pair and $8000/pair when it reaches these shores.