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You either buy it or you don’t. That’s the way I felt coming out of the Bell House last week in Brooklyn after watching Norah Jones, guitarist Jim Campilongo, bassist Lee Alexander, drummer Dan Reiser and guitarist/singer Richard Julien—i.e. The Little Willies— do their thing.

Constellation brought their new Jetsons inspired Cygnus DAC to CES, shown here in the hands of VP of Engineering Peter Madnick. The DAC contains four 32/192 DACs in a stereo balanced configuration, with separate DACs used for the positive- and negative-going signals of the left and right channels.

Inputs include USB, SPDIF, AES and Toslink and it looks like they've dropped the CD transport that was included in the demo at last year's CES. Price should be around $20k.

UK manufacturer Astin Trew had their new DAC 1 on display. Managing Director Michael Osborn was on hand to answer questions and look for US distribution for his products. The DAC 1 features asynch 24/192 USB as well as FireWire and I2S inputs. It has a 6922 buffered tube output stage for single-ended connections and solid state for balanced output. Price should be around $4,500-$5,000 and would arrive in about 2 months once distribution is set up.

Based on the popular Oppo 93, Primare was displaying their universal player that will retail for $5495. It plays all the typical Oppo disc formats including 3D Blu-ray and has custom audio, video and power supply circuitry. The BD32 is a gorgeous-looking product and the photo does not do it justice.

I'd file this one under DAC/preamp/streamer, with plenty of features and more to be announced. What we know: based on the company's DAC 8, there will be six digital inputs including all the usual suspects as well as wired and wireless networking, vTuner and UPnP. The DAC can upsample to 24/192 and includes a front panel display for control info and selected meta-data via DLNA/UPnP networked devices. Price will be around $15k.

Crystal Cable's first loudspeaker, the Arabesque, used a complex-shaped enclosure fabricated from glass panels. Three years later, the Dutch company showed the new Arabesque Mini ($25,000/pair plus $1000/pair for matching stands), which uses a small aluminum cabinet with the same "comma" cross-section as the glass speaker, a shape that confers advantages when it comes to controlling the inevitable air-space resonances. A beryllium-dome tweeter is coupled to a long-throw, 1" maximum excursion (presumably peak–peak) 6" woofer. Crystal specifies distortion as being <0.5% from 120Hz to 20kHz, though no spl is given for this specification.

For the past few years, Colorado company YG Acoustics has been exhibiting in a large "air-wall" space in the Sands Convention Center. Their reason for doing so was that it was a great place for a new company to get foot traffic, but the downside was that it took heroic efforts to get sound quality that would indicate what YG speakers were capable of. For the 2012 Show, they had moved to a large suite in the Venetian Tower, and finally they were showing what their $119,000/pair flagship, the Anat III Signature, was capable of.