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Google Bricasti and all that comes up are sites relating to Bricasti Design products. The name must be fanciful—it sounds Italian, but cofounders Brian Zolner and Casey Dowdell most likely are not, and the company's headquarters are not in Milan or Turin but in Massachusetts.

While its name might be whimsical, nothing else about Bricasti is. As John Marks reported in his review of Bricasti's M1 DAC in the August 2011 issue, both founders previously worked at Lexicon: Dowdell as a DSP-software engineer, Zolner as international sales manager. Bricasti develops its products in conjunction with Aeyee Labs, formed by a group of ex-employees of Madrigal Audio Laboratories and based in New Haven, Connecticut.

Back in the day, I owned a Sony Walkman cassette player. I loved it. I took it everywhere I went, listening to Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Neil Young (with and without Crosby, Stills & Nash), Miles, Coltrane, and more. Having music move around with me seemed a giant step into a more perfect future in which we could color our experiences with sound.

I spent most of my time at the January 2015 Consumer Electronics Show exploring amps and preamps for Stereophile's on-line coverage of the show, but there were a few items of interest to fans of multichannel. There were demonstrations of Dolby Atmos, Auro3D, and dts:X, but these mostly focused on movies—save for Auro3D's thrilling demo of 2L's Magnificat—an album of music by Arnesin, Gjeilo, and Kernis, with Anita Brevik conducting solo singers, chorus, and the Trondheim Soloists and recorded in a cathedral (Pure Audio Blu-ray, 2L-106-SABD). The ambience was more enveloping with Auro3D's added height dimension, compared to what I hear from 5.1 systems, but I'm not sure whether this will be enough to encourage music listeners to make the necessary investment.

After happily discovering that there were only three rooms to blog on floor 2, first up was the huge exhibit from one of the most dedicated dealers in the business, Doug White of The Voice That Is. Doug showcased a not-too-shabby system that included several premieres...

As I was leaving the room shared by Daedalus Audio, ModWright Instruments, and WyWires, a couple sat down and said to Lou Hinkley, Dan Wright, and Alex Sventitsky, "This is one of the rooms we had to come back to hear again."

I can understand why...

What, Jason, you're still on the 5th floor? How are you ever going to get all the way down to sub-Lobby Level, let alone be able to make some "Best of Show" calls, when you're only doing 18 rooms per day? Get a move on, Serinus! Such thoughts crossed my mind as Day One was drawing to a close, and I still had a few rooms left on the second of AXPONA's seven, not six, floors. But what is there to do but simply go with the flow, even if there's little flow left to go with at day's end?

People were going gaga over the Gibson Les Paul Reference Monitors, which debuted in the Gibson tent at CES before debuting at NAM and Frankfurt. In their US Consumer audio show premier, which celebrates the Les Paul Centenary, the GSLP 4" ($1198/pair), GSLP 6" ($1598/pair), and equally poetically-titled GSLP 8" ($1998/pair) displayed their pedigree as reference monitors suited for both home and studio. I found the balance a bit bright and sharp for my taste, but there was much to admire in the sound...