LATEST ADDITIONS

In two small, private presentations in the Mirage, Dave Wilson joined several other indispensible members of his team—his son Daryl and wife Sheryl Lee, as well as Peter McGrath and John Giolas—to present a jaw-dropping mock up of the proposed, superhumanly proportioned successor to the original WAMM.

Astell&Kern calls their new server an "MQS Network Audio Player", where MQS stands for "Master Quality Sound". WIth all the talk at the show about Meridian's new MQA technology, at first I confused it for "Master Quality Authenticated" and did a double take. Nonetheless, A&K's new product is quite a stunner as presented both on a stand with amplifier and as shown here, on a table top by itself.

I've always enjoyed Wadia's industrial design and the di122 is no exception with their new Series 1 compact casework. Meant to stack with other components in the line, the di122 is a straightforward DAC design with two SPDIF and two optical plus USB inputs on the back along with both balanced and unbalanced audio outputs.

New in Simaudio's room was the 208D which comes as a basic DAC for $2,200 and also a version with added network player for $3k. The 280D handles both PCM up to 32/384 and DSD up to DSD256 via USB. The analog stage is a fully balanced differential circuit which Simaudio claims increases dynamic range, headroom and signal to noise.

A new brand to me, it turns out that Melco is a division of Buffalo, the japanese computer memory company. Melco had two products on display: the N1Z server with two 512GB SSDs and dual power supplies for around $9k and the N1A with two 2TB hard drives and single power supply for approx $3k.

Other features include full networking capabilities, quick start up and shut down (5-15 seconds), DSD support and multiple USB 3 ports for back up and expansion.

In a repeat of last year's CES, Accuphase again showed up without their latest digital product actually in the room. So company representative Kohei Nishigawa was a good sport and again held up the photo of the soon to be released DC-37.

Sorry I don't have a better photo of this handsome component, which is at the top of the stack. Available now for $3,500, the M12 handles up to 24/192 PCM via USB as well as several card slots on the back for further options. One of those options is a $450 network card that enables the BluOS, aptX Bluetooth, WiFi and Ethernet. Control is via the Bluesound app which looked very nicely done. I hope to play with the M12 a bit more and see what it can do.