LATEST ADDITIONS

Yup, they grow 'em big in Pasadena. Stage III's Leviathan power cord ($14,500/1.5m) has much larger silver-palladium conductors than the previous flagship model.

MyCamera was positioned too close to Micromega's MyWorld cabling to take a focused picture. So let's let the cable do the talking...

Incorporating noise-cancelling geometries, DH Labs' forthcoming flagship Corona power cord (approx. $850/1.5m) is triple-shielded. The company's Greg Hovsepian notes that the cord, which makes "proprietary use of 1386 individual strands of silver-coated copper, is manufactured in the US.

Astell&Kern calls their new server an "MQS Network Audio Player", where MQS stands for "Master Quality Sound". WIth all the talk at the show about Meridian's new MQA technology, at first I confused it for "Master Quality Authenticated" and did a double take. Nonetheless, A&K's new product is quite a stunner as presented both on a stand with amplifier and as shown here, on a table top by itself.

I've always enjoyed Wadia's industrial design and the di122 is no exception with their new Series 1 compact casework. Meant to stack with other components in the line, the di122 is a straightforward DAC design with two SPDIF and two optical plus USB inputs on the back along with both balanced and unbalanced audio outputs.

New in Simaudio's room was the 208D which comes as a basic DAC for $2,200 and also a version with added network player for $3k. The 280D handles both PCM up to 32/384 and DSD up to DSD256 via USB. The analog stage is a fully balanced differential circuit which Simaudio claims increases dynamic range, headroom and signal to noise.

A new brand to me, it turns out that Melco is a division of Buffalo, the japanese computer memory company. Melco had two products on display: the N1Z server with two 512GB SSDs and dual power supplies for around $9k and the N1A with two 2TB hard drives and single power supply for approx $3k.

Other features include full networking capabilities, quick start up and shut down (5-15 seconds), DSD support and multiple USB 3 ports for back up and expansion.