LATEST ADDITIONS

With the assistance of Jochen Fabricius, who designed T+A's new cable line, I learned that T+A's Speaker Hex ($1600/3m pair) uses new Rhodium contacts, and contains six cores of stranded wire that are twisted for low inductance.

Scot Markwell of Elite AV Distribution proudly displayed Furutech's top-of-the-line Nanoflux power cable ($4395/1.8m, almost 6 feet). The cable's wire is coated with Nanofluid, microscopic gold and silver suspended in squalene oil that fills in tiny gaps between wire crystals to improve performance.

Larry Smith (left) and David Salz (right) of Wireworld have every reason to smile. Not only have they entered the headphone cable market with four levels of Nano cables for headphones and portables, and stand prepared to market a Starlight CAT7a media network cable ($TBD) that claims higher transmission speeds for streamed music and video, but they've also come out on top in a recently published cable listening comparison test.

With a major nod to ZenSati, who designed the cables, Viola Audio Labs' president and technical director Paul Jayson happily displayed the company's new cable line.

First time I've seen this manufacturer at CES, but WOW what a gorgeous product! I've included a couple more shots from their website so you can see how this Swiss jewel is put together. The aluminum chassis is surrounded on all four sides by glass, for example, and can sit vertical or horizontal.

Aurender had a cool hand-size device in their room that not only functions as a normal DAC/Headphone amp for portable use, but also sports optional mSATA storage up to 1TB(!!) of user installable SSD, turning the thing into a player. I must admit the form factor for the FLOW is pretty seductive with a large velocity sensitive volume knob on the front and smooth satin aluminum case.

Though the company calls the N100 a server in one of their press releases (not in the brochure luckily), I tend to think of these types of products as network players, since it does not have a built-in drive for storing music and relies on NAS drives on a network. Nonetheless, the N100, which retails for $2,499, looks very promising and will be available this month. Another version called the N100S with 1TB internal storage (thus making it truly a server) was also announced, though there was no price at press time.