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Is it an "implosive sound center" that offers, in Devialet's words, "The Best Sound in the World—1000 Times Superior to Current Systems," or is it an overblown puffer fish? Such thoughts crossed my mind as a young, computer-happy Devialeter, standing behind a curtain, fed techno music to the Phantom ($1990) and Silver Phantom ($2390), whose side panels in turn pumped in and out as it flooded a large suite in the Mirage with the driving beat of increasingly loud music that, if pumped through the water, might lead a poor puffer to puff its last.

Gilad Tiefenbrun, Managing Director of Linn Products (above), along with the Scottish company's Technical Director Keith Robertson, gave me a convincing demonstration of Linn's Exakt system. According to Linn, "Exakt pushes the lossless digital signal path all the way to the speaker," turning the loudspeaker into "an intelligent, connected, software-upgradeable product. This enables a wide range of performance- and personalisation-enhancing capabilities in design, in manufacture and in your home."

Working like a stereopticon, Edgar Choueiri's Bacch-SP provides up to a 32dB reduction of interaural crosstalk, not with headphones, but with everyday stereo loudspeakers. And without the coloration that previous solutions, like a physical barrier between the ears, are plagued by.

TAD's chief engineer, Andrew Jones, always cheerful and happy, took great pleasure in introducing his newest design, the TAD CE1 Compact Evolution One, a contemporary styled bookshelf loudspeaker. This product produced my once-a-show epiphany for good sound.

Brooklyn, NY-based Wes Bender Studio was demming the new leather-covered Hansen The Dragon Legend E speakers $60,000/pair), driven by EAR 509 monoblocks ($15,700/pair), an EAR 912 preamp ($13,000 with phono stage), and an EAR Disc Master turntable ($28,500) fitted with a Helius Silver Ruby tonearm ($5225) and Transfiguration Proteus ($6000) or SteinMusic Aventurin 6 Mk.2 ($6500) cartridges. Cabling was all Waveform Fidelity; racks were the impressively made Stillpoints.

Danish speaker manufacturer Gamut showed its new RS7 speaker at CES. Costing $39,900/pair, the RS7 is basically the smaller RS5 ($31,990/pair) that I favorably reported on in our 2014 RMAF report with an extra woofer mounted above the tweeter to give a full three-way design.

Rega introduced its first low-output moving-coil cartridge, the Apheta, in 2006, but it got mixed reviews, due to a high-frequency peak at the top of the audioband. Rega showed the Apheta 2 ($1895) at CES, mounted on the vestigial RP10 turntable. The Apheta 2 has benefited from some serious production engineering and has a lower moving mass, the latter moving the treble peak higher, to 18kHz or so.