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CES 2013

David Manley RIP

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Wednesday evening after the CES closed, Luke Manley (left) and Bea Lam (second left) of VTL held a reception to honor the memory of Luke's father and VTL founder David Manley, who passed away in December. Everyone present offered their memories of David, including Stereophile's Larry Greenhill (right) and Jason Serinus (second right).

CES 2013

Rockport's New Atria Speaker

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Speakers in the VTL room were Rockport's new Atria ($21,500/pair). This is a three-way dsign using a 9" carbon fiber sandwich-cone woofer, a 6" carbon fiber sandwich-cone midrange unit, and a 1" beryllium-dome tweeter, with Transparent Audio internal cabling. The 43.5"-tall speaker has a specified frequency response of 28Hz30kHz, 3dB, a 4 ohm impedance, and a sensitivity of 87dB/W/m. Driven by VTL MB450s in triode mode, Peter Gabriel singing David Bowie's "Heroes: from LP had a delicious tangibility to the voice and a powerful but clean bass line. "Sweet" I commented in my notebook.

CES 2013

Crystal's SAGA amplifier

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

The Arabesque speakers ($90,000/pair) in the Crystal room, with their glass enclosures, were familiar, as were the Crystal cables that Jason Serinus blogged about a few days ago. But the Siltech SAGA amplifierfor Structural Amplifier Gain Architecture were new. Designed by Siltech's Edwin Rijnveld and costing $100,000, the three-piece, 300Wpc amplifier comprises a preamplifier chassis with ultralow-noise tubes, a battery-powered voltage-amplifier chassis, and a current-amplifier chassis. No negative feedback is used, either global or local, and the current amplifier uses optical drive of the output transistors, called "Apollo Light Drive." Output device biasing is said to be class-A at all powers into all loads.

CES 2013

Meridian Updates the 7200 Speaker

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Meridian pioneered the integration of digital crossovers and D/A converters in a powered loudspeaker and the first room I visited at the 2013 CES featured the DSP7200 speaker ($38,000/pair). The has anew tweeter, said to be smoother and more open-sounding than the HF units used in earlier speakers, but perhaps more importantly, the 7200's crossover now compensates for the low-frequency group delay associated with the high-order alignment. This is difficult to do, as it conventionally demands a very long digital, computationally intense filter. However, Meridian's engineering team came up with a solution that only adds around 40 milliseconds of latency. While this might make video synchronization tricky, the added clarity at low frequencies was impressively audible. Bass started and stopped as it should, with none of the feeling of the lows being detached from the upper ranges that is typical of high-order woofer alignments.

CES 2013

JosephAudio's Pearl3

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Jeff Joseph was demming his new Pearl3 floorstanding speakers ($28,100/pair) in an all Bel Canto system (including their new USB converters), hooked up with Cardas cables. Jeff's music choice was decidedly idiosyncratic a duet for marimba and double bass, a recording of an African singer and sax player made in his backyard, Harry Belafonte live at Carnegie Hallbut with every kind of music, the Pearls allowed the music to speak most effectively.

CES 2013

Acoustic Zen & Triode

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

"The synergy is palpable between Triode Corporation's Japanese-made electronics and Acoustic Zen's loudspeakers and cables," wrote Jason Serinus earlier in this blog and I just wanted to add my 2 cents. As I had in many rooms at CES, I auditioned my recording of pianist Hyperion Knight performing Gershwin on the Acoustic Zen Crescendo speakers ($16,000/pair). The sound of the Steinway was sweetperhaps a little too sweet?and the soundstage was wide, deep, and stable.

CES 2013

YG's New Sonja 1.3 Speakers

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Audio critic Myles Astor was playing Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells"the LP that launched a thousand virgins," he quippedwhen i walked into YG's large room. Whether it was the Dan D'Agostino Momentum amplifiers, the Veloce LS-1 battery-powered preamp, the Kubula-Sosna Elation! cables, or the Scheu Analog Das Laufwerk 1 turntable with Scheu 12" Tacco arm and Scheu Ruby 3 cartridge, but the sound in this room was stunning. Or perhaps it was YG's new flagship speaker, the Sonja 1.3 ($106,800/pair)!

CES 2013

Magico's Mighty Q7

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Larry Greenhill, who was covering expensive amplification at CES for Stereophile already blogged about the Constellation preamp and power amplifiers that were being used to bi-amp Magico's top-of-the-line Q7 loudspeakers ($185,000/pair). But here's a photo of the speaker, which was connected with MIT cables. AC conditioning was courtesy of Shunyata, racks by HRS. The sound in this room was magnificent, whether it was Lyle Lovett's "The Boys from North Dakota," Leonard Cohen's 10 New Songs, or my own live recording of Cantus performing Curtis Mayfield's "It's Alright." Oh my!

CES 2013

Magico's Two-Way S1

Robert Deutsch, John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

At every CES, I seem to find out on the last day that there was something I should have checked out. And, sure enough, on Friday afternoon, I’m talking to Wayne Schuurman of the Audio Advisor, who mentions that Magico has a new speaker that’s about $13,000/pair.

CES 2013

The Mini Aero Wireless Speakers from Moos

John Atkinson Jan 17, 2013

Distributed in the US by Colleen Cardas Imports, the new Moos Mini Aero speakers ($2499/pair) represent a serious attempt to get good sound from powered wireless speakers. Founder of the Australian company, Tom Celinski, shown in the photo and once with Linn, told me that the two drive-units are ScanSpeak Revelators and, in fact, the speakers are assembled by ScanSpeak. A USB2.0 interface guarantees bit-accurate transmission of digital audio at up to 24bit/96kHz. The wireless data are fed to a DSP-based digital crossover running on Analog Devices SHARC floating-point chips. Thee crossover in turn feeds the data for each drive-unit to a quad mono differential Wolfson DAC which drives a Hypex 200W class-D amplifier module. The sound was open and spacious. The speaker, which was honored with an International CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Award, is scheduled to start shipping in April.