LATEST ADDITIONS

I fell in love with the sound of the unique omnidirectional mbl tweeter when I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/643/">reviewed</A&gt; mbl 111 loudspeaker in August 2002, so I always treat my ears by visiting the Berlin company's room the last morning of a Show. At the 2007 CES, they were showing <I>this</I>: an assault on the state of the speaker art based on two the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1004mbl/">mbl 101E</A>'s upper-frequency modules mounted on top of one another, with separate active woofer towers. The excess of glass in the hotel suite led to a rather uptilted high-treble balanced, but the presentation was as awesome aurally as it was visually.

BAT introduced the two-chassis, $18,500 REX preamplifier at CES. The 18-tube preamplifier incorporates vacuum-tube rectifiers, C-multipliers, oil capacitors, and shunt regulators to filter the power supply's DC voltages. The control module incorporates a 140-step volume control that uses a 16-bit digital control with Vishay bulk-metal&ndash;foil resistors as pass-through devices. Each input to the preamplifier can be adjusted individually.

I looked into the Cary Audio Design room in the Venetian Towers to catch up with designer Dennis Had to find out what the North Carolina company had been up to since I visited them a year ago. But he was out, so I settled back to enjoy some fine music on Dynaudio Confidence C4 speakers&mdash;favorites of mine since I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/794/">reviewed them</A> in September 2003&mdash;driven by the 10th-Anniversary Edition of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/740/">Cary's CAD805</A> single-ended triode monoblock, perhaps the finest-sounding of its breed. Source was the CAD-306 SACD player, back in production after some manufacturing problems with its Sony-sourced chipset. Nice. Very nice.

Whenever I have caught up with Ken Kessler (left) at audio shows in the past two years, he has uncharacteristically grumbled about all the work he was doing writing and compiling <I>McIntosh...For the Love of Music</I>. "Every time I interview someone connected with the iconic Binghampton audio company, they tell me about two more people I didn't know existed whom I should interview."

I got an email from <I>Stereophile</I> columnist John Marks Wednesday night, urging me to visit the room at the Venetian featuring speakers from retailer On Track Audio. I always do what I am told by my writers, so I looked in Thursday afternoon. There I auditioned the Directorate loudspeaker system, designed by mastering engineer Bill Roberts. All four cabinets are sealed boxes and are finished in exquisitely in-laid veneers, the work of On Track's Jim Carnes, who looks understandably pleased with his work in my photo. The sound with Belles amplification, and Kimber Kable, was <I>very</I> promising, I thought.

The Canadian <A HREF="http://www.gershmanacoustics.com/">Gershman</A&gt; Black Swan speaker ($30,000/pair), which mounts the tweeter and midrange unit in a separate A-frame enclosure to prevent their performance being affected by vibrations from the woofer, made its debut at HE2006 last May, and I was looking forward to hearing what it could do at CES.

Stephen Mejias mention Garth Powell's passion for what he does in his <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/011207furman/">report from the Furman room</A> at CES. AJ Conti, the man behind turntable manufacturer Basis Audio, has a similar passion for what he does. His current attention is focused on getting the drive belts for his well-regarded turntables as flat as possible, to eliminate the last vestige of drive-system spuriae from the audio recovered from vinyl. Dissatisfied with the highest precision he could get from commercial ground-belt vendors, he invested in his own production machinery.