LATEST ADDITIONS

On October 19, 2006, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) honored the latest 12 members of the CEA Hall of Fame at its awards dinner at the San Francisco CEA Industry Forum.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that an audiophile in possession of a good hi-fi must be in want of room treatment. The problem, most audiophiles agree, is that said treatment tends to be expensive, big, and fugly. Nucore Technologies, Inc. of Hillsborough, TN and RealTraps of New Milford, CT have some innovative new solutions.

Having read and heard copious praise of the two-chassis Metronome T2i-Signature CD player ($20,600), at times accompanied by claims that it can make CDs sound as good as SACDs reproduced in two-channel mode, I was eager to hear the new one-piece Metronome CD5-Signature player, distributed in the US by Jim Ricketts of tmh audio (above). The CD5-Signature, whose somewhat plain Jane appearance conceals both a tube output stage and variable volume control that can obviate the need for a preamp, retails for a "mere" $18,000. Introduced at the RMAF, it was powered by borrowed-at-the-last-minute Boulder monoblocks feeding Zerobox 109 loudspeakers (40Hz–35kHz response for $7500/pair) via Xindak cabling.

At the extreme high end&mdash;Halcro, VTL, Boulder, etc.&mdash;reviewers gush about a lack of character. If you're paying $20,000, you want a preamplifier or power amp to disappear. At those price points we also want extreme, unfatiguing resolution, and noise that's well below what most people would consider audible. But at those prices, an <I>absence</I> of character is definitely something most people aspire to.

The good news: Domestic audio has survived its first half century and continues to live above ground. The bad news: At an age when most hobbies can enjoy the luxury of splintering into smaller factions that hate each other with impunity, ours isn't big enough. There are too few audiophiles on Earth to indulge that kind of specialization, let alone support the very different magazines that would ensue&mdash;so we'll never get to enjoy such promising titles as <I>Liberal Tube Lover</I> (not that I didn't try), <I>The Elderly Skeptic</I>, or, of particular interest, <I>Cable Hating for People Who are Barely Audiophiles in the First Place</I>.

Gazing at the prototypes of Peter Bizlewicz’s forthcoming Panorama loudspeakers, I couldn’t help wondering if our beloved canine Baci Brown would either attack them as hostile intruders or try to mount them in a futile assertion of alpha dominance. Yes, not only the closest thing to alien invaders so far encountered at the show, but also visually hilarious, these speakers demanded a listen.

Those are the words that came to me as I began listening to the diminutive set-up in the room sponsored by Acoustic Sounds. As Eric Bibb & Needed Time made beautiful music on their Opus 3 LP, <I>Good Stuff</I>, I gazed at a pair of Manley Labs Snapper Monoblocks ($4250) and Stirling Broadcast LS3/5a V2 Speakers ($1695/pair) sitting on Target Audio MR 28 Speaker stands ($299), as well as a Silver Circle Audio Pure Power One 5.0 power transformer ($5000 with Vesuvius power cord). Interconnects, power cords, and loudspeaker cables were also from Silver Circle Audio.