LATEST ADDITIONS

On the first day of the Show, B&W announced the sixth generation of their flagship, full-range, three-way floorstanding 800 loudspeaker. The new 800 costs $24,000/pair and includes a transmission line-loaded, diamond-dome tweeter with a quad-magnet motor to increase sensitivity and dynamic range. Other features include a dual-magnet motor for the woofers, B&W's proprietary Kevlar FST midrange driver, a matrix enclosure and a crossover that includes silver, gold and oil construction Mundorf capacitors.

Naim Audio's all-in-one NaimUniti (Art Dudley's review will be in the March issue) has officially spawned a little cutie, er, qute. Dubbed the UnitiQute, the new product includes most of the features of the Uniti, with a more modestly powered amp at 30W per channel into 8 ohms.

Nothing beats starting off four days of room-hopping at CES on a joyful. In this case, the delights were provided by Jeff Joseph of Joseph Audio.

I timed my arrival in Las Vegas for early afternoon on Wednesday, the day before the Consumer Electronics Show opened, so I'd have enough time to get from <I>Stereophile</I> staff's little of island of sanity in the smoke-free, gambling-free Hyatt Place Las Vegas to press registration at the mammoth Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The traffic was considerably lighter than during the show, the lines for registration much shorter than I would have encountered on opening day.

I got to the LVCC just in time. The journalist registration line in the second floor pressroom was virtually non-existent . . . until I finished. By then, 20 more journalists had lined up behind me.

For the past several days, I’ve had Neil Young’s newly remastered solo debut playing on repeat. <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/musicroom/robertbaird/">Robert</a&gt; received a copy of the <a href="http://www.neilyoungarchives.com/">Neil Young Archives</a> Official Release Series HDCD and I swiped it from him. (Actually, I was like, “May I please listen to that awesome stuff, please?”) Young’s first four albums, <i>Neil Young</i>, <i>Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere</i>, <i>After The Goldrush</i>, and <i>Harvest</i>, make up the first offering from the NYA ORS:

Boulder has updated their 1021 disc player, <a href="http://stereophile.com/cdplayers/boulder_1021_disc_player/">reviewed by John Atkinson</a> last July, adding an ethernet jack on the back and an iPhone app to control multiple streams of content such as a NAS drive on the network or media server. Boulder's Rich Maez says the new player is currently in the debugging stage and should be available near the end of January for $24,000.