Ambient?
Penaudio's Sami Pentillä brought an entirely new line of loudspeakers to CES: the Ambient series.
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An Incredible Challenge and a Good Hobby
At the GamuT house, the first beauty that caught my eye was their new Phi3 loudspeaker dressed in drop-dead gorgeous zebra wood. "In Europe," said designer Lars Goller, "anything striped is really hot right now."
The GamuT Tweeter
All GamuT speakers sport a ring-radiator tweeter. The pointy thing in the middle is a metal waveguide—the perfect defense against little children poking in the tweeter dome.
Danish Hospitality
GamuT doesn't rent a display room at one of the hotels, instead they figure the best way to show off home loudspeakers is in a home. So they rent a palatial pad in the Las Vegas suburbs, invite us over for dinner (they fly in a Danish cook and assistant) and then we retire to the living room to check out the speakers and electronics.
Classy Class-A
VAS Audio's Sze Leung is the most consistently <I>up</I> audiophile we know—he's always raving about his latest listening session or discovery. "This one's incredible," he exclaimed, pointing to the 80Wpc Cayin H-80A Class-A tube hybrid integrated amplifier (approximately $4000)."
Like a Cathedral
Zanden's Kazutoshi Yamada builds amplifiers like Medieval villages built cathedrals: To glorify the quintessence. Jon Iverson and I were lured into his room because his Model 9600s were so . . . <I>shiny</I> (hey, we're guys, we're not complicated). Then we heard 'em driving the Ascendo System Z-F3 loudspeakers. Wowsers.
Beautiful Singing
Bel Canto's John Stronczer made a bold decision to demonstrate exclusively with a music server streaming Music Giants. He ran the output from his laptop to the $2495 e.One DAC3 digital-to-analog processor and then directly to a pair of e.One REF1000 1000W monoblocks ($1995 each).
The Oldest Trick in the Book
We walked in to the room and spotted a pair of floorstanding speakers. Stevie Ray Vaughan filled the room, so we assumed the floorstanders were channelling him. "Oh no, you're listening to <I>those</I>."
Too Much Fun
"Basically, we're just having too much fun," Conrad-Johnson's Lew Johnson told me. "We're introducing three new state-of-the-art products. Well, the ART Series 3 is more new and improved.