LATEST ADDITIONS

Mark Sossa of Well Pleased AV always puts together solid, good-sounding rooms, often featuring Merason DACs and Qln loudspeakers. At this show Sossa's system, fortified by Alma Music & Audio, reached new levels of transparency, quiet, and soundstaging, wowing and entrancing me.

Tom Vu brought a complete Triangle Art system to CAF, with his trademark gold-encrusted turntables at the center of the room—not one, not two, but three! Vu sold the most expensive turntable while I was away fetching coffee.

Linear Tube Audio occupied two rooms and demoed their LTA Century Monoblocks in a world-wide debut.

In addition to their showing in the Democracy room, Command Performance AV brought two US debut products to room 305: the J.Sikora Aspire turntable with the CF9 tonearm ($10,595) and the Innuos Stream3 music streamer with optional PhoenixDAC board ($12,600), which turns it into a fully fledged streaming music player.

Bella Sound's Michael Vice holds more than 50 patents as an electrical engineer. Like other large-brained thinkers I know, such as Stereophile Editor Jim Austin and Spin Doctor Michael Trei, when they talk, I just listen.

Lone Mountain Audio's Leland Leard brought a compact but mighty rig to Maryland, including an ATC CDA2 Mk2 Preamp/DAC/CD unit ($5499), Innuos ZENith Next-Gen server ($21,700), Innuos PhoenixNET switch ($4800; $3840 bundled with ZENith), and the US debut of the ATC Classic Series SCM20ASL active loudspeakers ($10,999/pair, standard finish).

Alma Music and Audio of San Diego, California, and Sterling, Virginia, showed two well-appointed systems at CAF including several US debuts.