LATEST ADDITIONS

This is Rosemarie Torcivia. I just met her today. She works for Source Interlink Media, the parent company of <I>Stereophile</I> and <I>Home Theater</I> magazines. She gets to spend her days at CES in the <I>Stereophile</I> and <I>Home Theater </I> suite answering questions and being a knowledgeable and friendly face for the dealers, manufactures and readers who pop in to say hello. She was thrilled when I took her picture and told her she was going to be in the official <I>Stereophile</I> CES blog. <I>I</I> was thrilled when Rosemarie helped Jon Iverson and I get lunch today. I like Rosemarie and I bet you would too.

God, how I love mbl's demos. Their rooms at RMAF have been major highpoints of the last two shows for me, and their exhibit at CES 2010 is just as fine. There was an incredible warmth and inner glow to the midrange, a tremendous presence and clarity to the sound of cymbals, just the right weight to an electric bass, and a wonderful transparency throughout the range that made me want to stay forever.

The highly acclaimed dCS Ring DAC featured in the pricier <a href="http://stereophile.com/hirezplayers/dcs_scarlatti_sacdcd_playback_syste…;, Paganini and <a href="http://stereophile.com/hirezplayers/dcs_puccini_sacd_playback_system/#"…; products, is now available in the new Debussy DAC, expected to come in around $10,000.

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.

When I entered the Nordost room, Roy Gregory and Lars Kristensen of Nordost were in the midst of preparing a demo of their Foundation Theory. Although the literature on the theory, which should be available on Nordost's website, consumes five small-print pages, the basic theory boils down to this: consistency in your brand of cabling, whatever the brand may be, produces greater rewards than mixing different lines of cabling.

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.