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"Head Monster" Noel Lee is known as a shrewd, successful businessman, but I think that if he had taken a different career path he could have made a great evangelist. His CES press conferences have very much feeling of revival meetings, and, like an evangelist, he works hard at whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Given the largely skeptical audience of media representatives, Lee is not always successful in this, but you certainly can't fault his enthusiasm. (Consumer electronics journalists are a tough crowd.)

The Sony press conference is arguably the most prestigious at CES—and the largest. It would have been even larger if Sony did not have the policy of allowing only select invited members of the media to attend. Having a Press badge by itself does not guarantee admission. Even so, I overheard a Sony rep saying to one of his colleagues that attendance at the Sony press conference was over 1600.

NAD has jumped into the headphone arena with their VISO HP50 ($279), an extremely lightweight and comfortable, noise-isolating, over-the-ear design. The detachable cable plugs into either the right or left earcup and has smart phone and microphone controls. NAD’s “RoomFeel” technology is said to improve stereo sound.

It seems like everyone and their grandma is releasing a headphone these days. If you’ve got a brand (or a band), you might as well add a line of headphones. One of the latest to join the trend is the English rock band, Motorhead, famous for their jukebox wonder, “Ace of Spades.” Lead singer, Lemmy, was on hand to introduce his Motorheadphones. (Hee hee.)

Mike Yee (shown here holding his DAC) has been working for the past several years on a unique approach to DAC design. He has invented a technique (for which he has applied for a patent) he calls MODR or Musically Optimized Digital Reconstruction.

Yee uses an FPGA (field programmable gate array) to intercept the digital signal as it comes into the DAC. The FPGA provides a proprietary "pre-emphasis" conditioning of the signal before the DAC chip to "remove the DAC's effect on quantization error." After the DAC chip, an analog stage provides de-emphasis prior to output.

There are SPDIF and Toslink 24/192 inputs as well as a 16/48 USB port. On the front are LEDs to indicate the sample rate. Introductory price is $1,000

EMM's new transport sports an Esoteric drive and is intended to mate with the company's DAC2X DAC. Retail price is $17,000 or $30,000 when bought together with the DAC2x. When the two are connected, "CDs and SACDs are automatically upsamples to 5.6 MHz, which is double SACD's standard sampling rate." There is an optical out for DSD and AES/EBU for PCM (from CD or SACD).

McIntosh had their new D100 digital preamplifier on hand with five digital inputs (each with their own DAC according to the company's Marc Lamb) and remote controlled volume. The preamp/DAC has been optimized to work with headphones and will retail for $2,500.