Several rooms this year are sporting 1/4" reel to reel decks as source components. <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/012907master/index.html">The Tape Project</A> has caught on with exhibitors in the Venetian including Pioneer/TAD & Magico. Representatives from TTP were often spotted hauling reel to reel tapes, along with the machines that play them (such as this modified Technics 1600) up and down the halls.
We glanced into Oracle's room to see what was new. We'd seen the Delphi, we'd seen the CD 1500 and CD 2500 before. "Nothing new?" we asked.
Audio Space's DAC-1 US ($3000) is a hybrid tube/Mosfet DAC with a difference.It has two pairs of RCA analog outputs: One deriving its signal from the tube DAC; the other taking its signal from the discrete Mosfet DAC.
The Lyngdorf Server 1 is a music and video server had us drooling. Lyngdorf, of course, loves to keep signals digital until the last millimeter, building DACs into their active DSP-driven loudspeakers. The Server 1 sounded great—there was just one problem: It isn't available. Yet.
The PS Audio Memory Link ($1695) is a CD/DVD/RAM drive. It's a mechanical player (<I>ie</I>, it still spins the discs), but it has an unusually large cache. Conventional players have caches of around 8–16MB, the Memory Link has a 64MB cache. Why is this better?
The digital outputs include HDMI for audio only output.
Wes Phillips, Stephen Mejias, and Kal Rubinson join San Antonio, Texas retailer Galen Carol on the way to the Venetian. As Galen explained to us, high end retailing is a bit of a challenge, but still viable to dealers that take care of their customers and offer old fashioned service.
I was excited to see Cambridge Audio's TT50 turntable. On display with their small, S30 loudspeakers ($259/pair), the TT50 was looking pretty darn sexy in its high-gloss jet-black finish. If it reminds you of Pro-Ject's popular Debut III, that's probably because the TT50 was developed in partnership with that Austrian firm. It uses a proprietary tonearm, an Audio Technica AT95E moving magnet cartridge, and its elastomer-coated acrylic platter is said to "control resonance and provide matched acoustic impedance to the vinyl record for maximum detail retrieval."
See this man?
And here is Adam Shaw-Cotterill licking the Mezzo 1's Aspirated Tweeter. I'm not sure why he's licking it. He must really love it.