LATEST ADDITIONS

Do VAC tube components possess chameleon-like powers? That's the question I've begun to ask: Each time I encounter their components in different settings, I hear radically different sound. Here, from a system including Nola's towering new Concert Grand Reference Gold 2 loudspeakers ($250,000/pair), an Audio Research REF CD8 CD player, Nordost Odin 2 cabling, and VAC's Statement 450S IQ amplifier ($63,000), Master line stage ($28,000), and VAC DAC MK II ($12,000), the sound was midrange preponderant—not at all what I expected to hear from either VAC electronics or a 275lb open-baffle line-source array design with a claimed frequency range of 18Hz–100kHz, 91dB sensitivity, and 8 ohm impedance. I think the room was simply too shallow in depth, with seats too close, for these speakers to strut their stuff.

For a room too small for Tekton's massive, multi-driver Moab loudspeakers ($4500/pair), Parasound and Tekton were getting surprisingly good sound. The small system lineup was headed by the new Parasound Classic 200 Integrated ($1195), which includes an all-analog signal path, analog bass management with high and low pass outputs, a DAC whose circuitry is, in the company's words, "pulled directly out of the award-wining Halo P-5," and far more goodies than you might expect at this price point.

Ed Meitner goes analog?

Not really. But the famed digital pioneer and founder of EMM Labs, known especially for his work with DSD/SACD, was showing his prototype optical phono preamp, the Optical Equalizer. Designed solely for use with DS Audio's optical cartridges, it can be described as a marriage between analog and digital. With specific filters for the different DS Audio cartridge models, it's expected in the first quarter of 2020.

It’s no surprise that the Wilson Audio rooms were buzzing. Both Sheryl Lee Wilson and her late husband Dave’s successor, son Daryl, were on hand to unveil, in passive display, the new Chronosonic XVX loudspeaker ($329,000/pair, seen to Daryl’s right).

Before the revelation of Bryston’s new BDA-3.14 streamer/DAC/digital preamp ($4195) came another, far less welcome one: The Gaylord Resort and Convention Center is huge. Ridiculously huge, and constructed with less-than-penetrable logic.

Like most older teens growing up in the South in the late 1970s, I had two poles of rock and roll heroes: The Allman Brothers Band and ZZ Top on one side, Yes and King Crimson on the other.

An editorial note: We recently republished Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt's 1966 review of the Swiss Thorens TD-150AB turntable. This was the first high-end 'table I bought after leaving university and earning a wage. But as good as I felt the TD-150AB to be, with its belt drive and sprung suspension, it was sonically overshadowed both by Thorens's TD 124 turntable and by the English Garrard 301 turntable.