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Speculation has it that a big reason for such large attendance at the Los Angeles & Orange County Audiophile Society meetings are their raffles of valuable cabling and electronics. T.H.E. Show Newport Beach followed suit, with hundreds of people gathering in the Hilton Courtyard at 2pm Sunday for the "must be present to win" opportunity to win over $25,000 worth of High-End Audio Give-Away goodies. This photo, which shows white-shirted publicist Lucette Nicoll snapping a photo of the raffle stage, only pictures part of the large crowd.

Stephen Mejias, formerly of Stereophile, now VP of Communications at AudioQuest, performed a most convincing cable comparison using the company's top-of-the-line AudioQuest Diamond Ethernet cable ($695 for 0.75m, $1195 for 1.5m). In a system whose JRiver-equipped MacBook Pro fed CD-quality files to an Audio Research Reference DAC, Audio Research Reference 75 amplifier, and Vandersteen Treos outfitted with a double bi-wire pair of AQ WEL Signature cabling, Roy Orbison's "Crying" sounded one-dimensionally flat and a little bright on top via a generic Ethernet cable. When Stephen switched to the AQ Diamond Ethernet cable, voice and instruments suddenly and dramatically acquired depth, air, dimensionality, and subtlety.

Another great singer/songwriter at the Atrium Poolside was Audra Lee. Check her out on YouTube or her Facebook page. Gratitude to Richard Beers and Bob Levi for such great entertainment.

Hands down, the most impressive full-range system I encountered during my first hours in T.H.E. Hilton on Day 2 of T.H.E. Show Newport Beach was jointly sponsored by Synergistic Research and Scott Walker Audio of Anaheim. Held in the freezing Crystal Ballroom, which definitely called for hot music as an antidote to potential hyperthermia, the system paired Magico Q7 loudspeakers ($185,000/pair), VAC's Master Signature preamp w/phono ($40,000) and State monoblocks ($78,000/pair) with an unidentified computer audio/music server set-up and unauditioned Kronos Sparta turntable with arm ($28,000) and Sonorus ATR open-reel machine ($17,500).

Entering the first of four rooms sponsored by Brian Berdan's Audio Element of Pasadena felt like coming home. Not only was I among familiar friends—Wilson Audio Sasha Series 2 loudspeakers ($29,950/pair); mighty VTL Siegfried Reference monoblocks Series II ($65,000/pair), accompanied by VTL's TL-7.5 Reference line preamplifier Series III ($25,000) and TP-6.5 Signature phono stage ($12,000); dCS four-stack, state-of-the-art Vivaldi Digital Playback System ($108,996 total); Transparent Opus MM and Reference cables ($105,500 total); Grand Prix Audio Silverstone 4-shelf Isolation system ($19,175), Monaco-5 shelf Isolation system ($8400), and Formula Platforms ($6900); Audience AdeptResponse aR12TSS power conditioner ($11,545); and, a bit less familiar, Grand Prix Audio Monaco 1.5 turntable ($23,500) with new Tri-Planar SE tonearm ($7500) and luscious Lyra Etna cartridge ($6995)—but I also finally heard a quality of musical presentation that decades upon decades of attending live performance have led me to hunger for.

When I began my journey into audiophilia, I was in awe of the Audio Research Corporation's flagship SP preamplifiers. As I sat there in the early 1980s with my modest Apt Holman preamp, all of my friends had ARC SP6Bs. By today's standards, the SP6B was colored, did not portray a realistic soundstage, and lacked sufficient gain to amplify the low-output moving-coil cartridges of the day. But it had an intimacy in the midrange that was intoxicating. (Still considered a classic design by many, the SP6B's price on the used market has remained virtually unchanged for 30 years.) Then, still in the early '80s, ARC raised the bar with the SP-10 ($3700). It had 15 tubes and an outboard power supply, and set a new standard for delicacy, drama, and authority. (John Atkinson still has the SP10 he bought in 1984.)

Audiophiles spend a lot of time thinking about the law of diminishing returns. We'd all agree that spending $1000 to replace an iPhone and generic earbuds with one of Stephen Mejias's "Entry Level" systems is in the early, steep part of the curve: a huge jump in performance for relatively small investment. We'd also agree, or at least suspect, that after you've spent that $1000, the curve gets a lot flatter. What we don't agree on is the shape of the curve between these points. The ideal situation is to find the knee: the point at which the curve's slope changes dramatically. At the knee, we've gotten most of what we want, and the next increment of performance improvement is disproportionally expensive.