LATEST ADDITIONS

After 10 years of selling the $15,000/pair Ultima Salon as its flagship speaker system, Revel introduced a redesign, the $22,000/pair Ultima2 Salon, at CES 2007. When I reviewed the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/96/">original Salon</A>, I was very pleased by its bass extension and dynamics. What's new in the Mk.2 Salon? It has a more conventional look, and employs all-new drivers that performed better in double-blind tests conducted by the manufacturer. While retaining the basic configuration&mdash;a four-way design with one tweeter, one midrange, one mid-woofer and 3 woofers&mdash;the Salon 2 no longer has side panels, a rear-firing port, or a rear-firing tweeter. Revel had a pair of the Ultima2 Salons playing in a demo room at the Hilton, driven by a 200Wpc Mark Levinson No.433 amplifier via Transparent speaker cable, a Levinson No.32 Reference preamplifier, and a Levinson No.390S CD processor. The loudspeaker played with all the dynamics and excellent LF response of the original Salon, reproducing the powerful deep bass of the organ accompaniment to John Rutter's <I>Requiem</I>. There was also a richness and smoothness that I found very pleasing.

I fell in love with the sound of the unique omnidirectional mbl tweeter when I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/643/">reviewed</A&gt; mbl 111 loudspeaker in August 2002, so I always treat my ears by visiting the Berlin company's room the last morning of a Show. At the 2007 CES, they were showing <I>this</I>: an assault on the state of the speaker art based on two the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1004mbl/">mbl 101E</A>'s upper-frequency modules mounted on top of one another, with separate active woofer towers. The excess of glass in the hotel suite led to a rather uptilted high-treble balanced, but the presentation was as awesome aurally as it was visually.

BAT introduced the two-chassis, $18,500 REX preamplifier at CES. The 18-tube preamplifier incorporates vacuum-tube rectifiers, C-multipliers, oil capacitors, and shunt regulators to filter the power supply's DC voltages. The control module incorporates a 140-step volume control that uses a 16-bit digital control with Vishay bulk-metal&ndash;foil resistors as pass-through devices. Each input to the preamplifier can be adjusted individually.

While John Atkinson awaits a review sample of Parasound's just-released JC 2 two-channel analog preamp ($4000), photographed here (second from top) with Parasound president Richard Schram by Kalman Rubinson, I took the opportunity to discuss its genesis with Richard.

Whenever I have caught up with Ken Kessler (left) at audio shows in the past two years, he has uncharacteristically grumbled about all the work he was doing writing and compiling <I>McIntosh...For the Love of Music</I>. "Every time I interview someone connected with the iconic Binghampton audio company, they tell me about two more people I didn't know existed whom I should interview."

I couldn't resist posting this photo, not of a product, but of <I>photos</I> of a product, just to get Mikey Fremer all riled up about the fact that the Continuum Caliburn turntable, for which he forked out mucho dinero, is no longer the Big Dog of LP playback.

The Canadian <A HREF="http://www.gershmanacoustics.com/">Gershman</A&gt; Black Swan speaker ($30,000/pair), which mounts the tweeter and midrange unit in a separate A-frame enclosure to prevent their performance being affected by vibrations from the woofer, made its debut at HE2006 last May, and I was looking forward to hearing what it could do at CES.