New Quad PA-One Headphone Amplifier
Finished in Lancaster Grey, the Quad PA-One headphone amplifier is a full-tube design, with a built-in DAC.
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LATEST ADDITIONS
Pass Laboratories' New Integrated Amplifier
Pass Laboratories designer Wayne Colburn showed me their new INT-60 Integrated amplifier ($9000). Rated at 60Wpc, the amplifier uses the same heatsinks, power supplies, and output stages as the Pass Point 8 power amplifiers.
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Pass Laboratories' New HPA-1 headphone amplifier
Pass Laboratories celebrated its 25th Anniversary in business by introducing its HPA-1 headphone amplifier ($3500). The circuitry is a two-stage CFA topology using cascaded ultra-low noise Toshiba JFETs driving complementary Fairchild power MOSFETs running in class-A.
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Nagra's Classic Integrated
Matthieu Latour, Nagra's Marketing Director, spent time showing me the Swiss company's new Classic Integrated Amplifier ($19,450). Both Nagra's Classic Integrated Amplifier and Classic stereo power amplifier deliver 100Wpc into 8 ohms and are strikingly similar, but differ in that the integrated unit has 3 RCA inputs and 1 XLR input and cannot be bridged. It uses a solid-state circuit preamplifier section. The Classic Integrated amplifier will be available in May, 2016.
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Thiel Impresses
The Thiel TM3 loudspeakers ($3500/pair) looked extremely nicebut it was hard to listen. All I could think about was that girl on the poster's lips and the shadows on her cheeks. The cut angles on the TM3s seemed to match her face. And the flowersI can't remember the last time I saw flowers in a CES room.
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PrimaLuna: the Warmth of Tubes?
PrimaLuna products flesh out texture, hall sound, and instrumental color better than the tube amps of yore and on the scale of warm to cool, PrimaLuna is always exactly in the middleas in Goldilocks' "just right." In fact, I would have to say that PrimaLuna's just-right neutrality is its #1 best trait.
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A New Amplifier from Hegel
Last year, I raved-reviewed the Hegel H160 integrated amplifier. It was probably the best all-around integrated amp I studied. I laughed that it had only two analog inputs but six assorted digital ones. I didn't laugh while the H160 grabbed every loudspeaker in my house by its cojones and gently forced the frightened cones to submit. Maybe it was the black mask faceplate or maybe was Hegel's SoundEngine technology. I don't know, but unquestionably, the H160's 150Wpc (into 8 ohms) had a very special way with speaker cones.
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Morel's Floorstanders
Morel's USA distributor, Nir Paz, was demonstrating the Octave 6 Limited Edition floorstanders ($6000/pair). He was driving them with the new 250Wpc (into 8 ohms) Hegel H360 integrated amplifier ($5700).
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Audio Alchemy and TAD
The surprising combination of the superb-sounding (but prototype) Technical Audio Devices Laboratories (TAD) loudspeakers with the wonderfully affordable Audio Alchemy electronics manifested some penetratingly beautiful Roy Orbison music.
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Graham Nash Visits Chord Electronics in the Venetian
Chord Electronics had their suite divided into two rooms at CES, the main room as shown in the photo above and the smaller back room where all the headphone listening was taking place. Chord had their Mojo and Hugo TT DACs set up with a variety of Audeze headphones as reported earlier.
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But in the main room was their latest DAVE DAC (which I'll be profiling in a later post) as well as some of their best electronics. The system was topped off with one of my personal favorites, the Vienna Acoustics The Music loudspeakers.