LATEST ADDITIONS

Due to a scheduling conflict I missed the press conference with power point presentation (you can see the slides here), but having spent some time with Chord's Rob Watts in the past, I'm sure the new products are packed with carefully thought out tech. Pictured here is the new Chord Hugo₂, which follows on the heels of the successful Hugo DAC launched three years ago.

The palm-sized Chord Mojo DAC/Headphone amp is arguably one of the best portable audio invigoration devices around, so why not add some more super-powers? The Poly is a networking "module" which adds streaming, network and SD card playback to the Mojo. The Poly is about half the size of the Mojo and snaps onto one end. Very clever.

An upscaling CD Transport. Yes you read right, this CD transport upscales your discs using, according to Chord, "the power of the new Xilinx XC7A200T FPGA, which has a standout 740 DSP cores, to develop sophisticated WTA (Watts Transient Alignment) filtering and upscaling algorithms which can output digital data at 705.6kHz (16 x CD’s 44.1kHz native resolution)." Whew!

For those of you who like all of your functions tucked away in a single shiny box, Burmester has a product for you. The main all-in-one 161 Receiver is based on the company's Music Server 151 and the system also includes the B15 speakers (not shown) and the handy empty case that sits below the active electronics. Burmester says the empty case with fold down front door (shown below) is part of the product since their customers don't like clutter and prefer to store extraneous stuff like AppleTV boxes and game consoles out of the way. I realize that probably sounds a bit pretentious to some, but it makes sense to me, since I tend to go out of my way to hide wires and power supplies.

The Acoustique Quality Passion loudspeakers ($20,000/pair) made their way to Las Vegas from the Czech Republic, courtesy of Vladimir Sapara. The flagship loudspeaker in the Acoustique line, it is based on 25 years of loudspeaker design, and features a cabinet by Novague Design.

The most stunning Ypsilon product on display was their MC-26L-SLV silver-wire step-up transformer ($18,500), sitting next to the turntable in the room's live exhibit&#133

Robb Niemann, the CEO of Rutherford Audio, North American distributor for Burmester, had new product and new corporate news to share…