LATEST ADDITIONS

It’s been a long time since I listened to a pair of Sound Lab electrostatic speakers, but the gigantic A-1Xes ($28,270/pair), powered by MSB M203 monoblocks in the room Sound Lab was sharing with San Diego dealer Blue Skies Audio, sounded as awesome as I remembered from when Dick Olsher reviewed the A-1 in the 1990s. (Review to be posted in Stereophile's free on-line archives in late June.)

German electronics manufacturer Einstein had made a virtue out of necessity, using the packing crates as stands for their The Source player and The Amp integrated amplifier (approximately $19,000). With Audio Machina CRL speakers ($10,000/pair), a recording of the operetta Die Fledermaus offered an enormous yet stable soundstage, with the whistling featured on the chosen cut set well back.

I was familiar with the unique concentric, point-source, multiway drive-unit from French manufacturer Cabasse, as Michael Fremer had reviewed the spherical Baltic II speaker that used it back in 2005. But the floorstanding Pacific 35A speaker ($19,900/pair), which complements the smaller spherical Riga(inboard, on stands) with a pair of powered 7" woofers was new to me. In a system featuring Esoteric’s A-02 monoblock amplifiers and K-03 disc player—Esoteric distributes Cabasse in the US—and WireWorld cables, the late Eva Cassidy’s voice on “Field of Gold” was reproduced with rock-solid stereo imaging and a natural tonality.

“That’s the speaker I am holding,” explained Exelway’s representative, “it includes a 20W amplifier and a Bluetooth connection. It is called the Slimspeaker.” Slim this Korean speaker certainly was and sounded bigger than I was expecting, given a degree of low-frequency reinforcement from the wall it was mounted on.

I was taken back more than 20 years when I entered the Musical Surroundings room in the Atrium, as Garth Leerer was playing “Le Temps Passé” from Michel Jonasz’s LP La Fabuleuse Histoire du Mr. Swing. This cut from the French singer used to be a staple at shows in the late 1980s. Played on the AMG Viella 12 turntable and arm ($17,000) that Michael Fremer describes as a “good value” in our August 2013 issue, fitted with the same sample of the Clearaudio Goldfinger Statement cartridge that Mikey reviewed, with Wilson Sasha W/Ps driven by an Aesthetix Atlas amplifier ($10,000), Aesthetix Janus Signature preamplifier ($10,000), the LP produced a wall-to-wall soundstage with excellent dynamics.

The Hungarian Heed speakers in the first of the two Profundo rooms were new to me. The odd-looking Enigma speaker ($3850/pair), similar in appearance to the Direct Acoustics Silent Speaker combines a 1" soft-dome tweeter with an 8" woofer in a vented cabinet that is claimed to combine the benefits of a quarter-wave transmission line and a reflex design. Louis Armstrong performing “Mood Indigo” had excellent presence, though the clarinet sounded a little "hooty."

The price of the Duke loudspeaker from Trenner & Friedl—$175,000/pair—took my breath away when I heard it at the 2011 CES. The Austrian company’s Isis ($40,000/pair), on display in Profundo's second room, uses the same compression driver for the HF as the Duke but combines it with an 8" paper-cone midrange unit and a 15" paper-cone woofer in a conventional, if large, cabinet. (Each cone is doped with six coats of lacquer.) The sound of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, from the Witches’ Brew RCA LP on a Basis turntable, with the speakers driven by Viva Audio Aurora tube monoblocks ($43,500/pair), had huge dynamics and a natural tonal balance. The image of the solo oboe that represents the cock crow at dawn in this work was superbly well-defined, without any exaggeration of its size.