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Joe Perfito's Tributaries cable line is mainly found in home-theater systems but Joe launched a new brand at RMAF, Clarus, aimed at the high-end two-channel market. Significantly more expensive than the Tributaries equivalents—Clarus Crimson balanced interconnect sells for $1500/1 pair and the Clarus Aqua $800/1m pair, compared with $400/1m pair for a Tributaries balanced cable—Clarus cables are designed by Jay Victor, who, I was told, has previously contributed cable designs to Monster and AudioQuest, among others. The speaker cables feature a combination of a large-gauge rectangular conductor and multiple Litz-wound conductors. All the cables feature polyethylene dielectrics and all PC-OCC copper conductors.

Joe was still fine-tuning the system—B&W 803 Diamond speakers, McIntosh MCD100 CD player/DAC and McIntosh monoblocks, and a Tributaries power manager when I visited the Clarus room—but I kidded him that the only non-Clarus cable in the system was the USB link from the laptop to the McIntosh MCD100.

"That's a familiar sight—and a familiar sound." When I walked into On A Higher Note's large room on the Denver Tech Center Marriott's mezzanine floor, the speakers being demmed were the Vivid B1s that I review in the October issue. I loved the sound of the $14,990/pair B1s in my room and they were doing equally sterling duty at RMAF, driven by a Luxman M600A amplifier ($8500) and a modified Revox open-reel recorder. A 15ips tape of a cello, piano, and double bass playing what sounded like a tango by Astor Piazolla, recorded in LA's Disney Hall by Yarlung Records, had an ease to its sound that allowed the music to flow. The room had a touch too much bloom in the upper bass—perhaps the Synergistic "magic bowl" you can see on the post on the wall behind the speakers was fatigued after a long day adjusting the room acoustics.

“In nature, sound has three elements,” explained BSG Technologies’ Larry Kay: “Amplitude, frequency, and phase.”

At a hi-fi show, there are many different types of demos. In some, there is music played casually, seemingly without much thought, selected either by the host or by an attendee; in others, music is carefully selected and introduced by your host, each track used to display certain characteristics of the system at hand; in others still, music is certainly played, but only after attendees are offered a detailed explanation of the gear in the room&#151we learn about the technologies employed and the work that went into creating the product&#151and we might even learn something about the art and science of listening. These last rooms are like demo-lectures, and they’re my favorite rooms. I feel like I’m in a classroom again, with one of my favorite professors.

Something strange and awesome was going on in the Zu Audio room. The lights were low, an evil but alluring sound was filling the room, and the company’s Sean Casey was crouched down in a corner, surrounded by vinyl.

Here we see AudioStream’s Michael Lavorgna in serious listening mode. (We can’t seem to keep him away from vinyl.) The album is Edward Ka-Spel’s O Darkness! O Darkness!

In 2010, sales of motorcycles equipped with sidecars accounted for only 4% of total motorcycle sales in the US. But that was a significant increase over 2009, which was itself an increase over 2008. While numbers remain low overall, sales of sidecar motorcycles are going up at a decent rate, while sales of most other motorcycles are in the toilet.

Trends in turntable design shift back and forth over time, each "advance" turning out to be a mostly sideways move. Over its long history, VPI's founder and designer, Harry Weisfeld, has moved the analog goalposts back and forth as he's refined his thinking. His early turntables were mostly standard spring-suspension designs of normal size. By the time Weisfeld produced his fully tricked-out TNT model, which was originally designed to stably hold the heavy moving mass of Eminent Technology's ET2 air-bearing arm, he'd moved to a massive, oversized, sandwiched plinth with isolating feet at the corners. He first used springs and, later, air bladders originally designed to cushion a tractor-trailer's load, and which he'd found in a trucker's supply catalog. Via an O-ring, the TNT's outboard motor drove one of three pulleys that protruded from holes in the plinth, and attached to a T-shaped subchassis that, in turn, drove the other two pulleys via two additional O-rings.