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My beat at T.H.E. Show 2016 was the ground floor. En route to the audio exhibits, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this beautiful black Bugatti. No information on this particular car was available, but I assumed it was part of the display of tasty automobiles in the Hotel Irvine's lobby and outdoors pavilion, put on by Reus Car Audio Design, Whitledge Design, Wyred 4 Sound, Magnum Automotive Design, and The Source Audio Video Design Group. Pride of place in the car exhibit was Sony's Hi-Res Audio demo vehicle, which had been shown off two days earlier at the Capitol Studios event in Hollywood.

At one point, an attendee approached me in the hallway and said, "Is it just me, or are a lot of these rooms bright?"

There's more than one way to skin a cat—a profusion of ways to hook together audio components in the high-end world of today—and my hunch is that the number of dedicated cabling companies has increased within the past decade, and now exceeds that of any other audio-hardware category.

CD player prices continue to go down and, surprisingly, sound quality goes up; the Yamaha CD-X1 is an example of both. It's a front-drawer loader with some interesting innovations. Pushing the Open/Close button opens the drawer; it can be closed either by pushing the same button again or by pressing lightly against the end of the open drawer. (We understand this was done because many such players have been damaged by users trying to force the drawer shut by hand.)

The unit has three operating modes: Auto, Manual and Single. In Auto, play begins as soon as the drawer is closed, or as soon as the AC is turned on if a disc is already loaded. In Manual, play begins only when you press the Play button. Single is the same as Manual except that the unit goes into Pause after playing a single selection. Pressing Pause then plays the next selection.

I've included the long view of this room to demonstrate the lengths to which Ocean Way Audio's Allen Sides, in partnership with Viola Labs, went to achieve reference quality sound at T.H.E. Show…

Saturday, June 11, 1–7pm, Esoteric Audio (111 W Monroe Street, Suite 100, Phoenix), is presenting "Musical Bliss for any Budget" with Aerial, Aesthetix, dCS, Musical Surroundings, and Simaudio, while from 11am–7pm, Integrity Sound (4035 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota) will host a special "Truth in Sound" event with MartinLogan, Parasound, and AudioQuest.

Only one question followed me to the 14th floor of Hotel Irvine: Will floor 2's unprecedented number of good-sounding rooms be repeated on other floors during T.H.E. Show Newport?