CES 2006

When your company is called Muse, I guess some product names just suggest themselves. When Kevin Halverson needed a moniker for his CD, DVD-A/V, and SACD player, he thought of Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred poetry, geometry, mime, meditation, and agriculture. Halverson says, "It means 'many voices," which it also does.

Leave it to a bass player. John Atkinson sidled up to Jon Iverson and me last night and said, "Have you heard Ascendo's room yet? It has a bandpass woofer that doesn't sound like a bandpass woofer at all—it sounds good."

It has been a while since we saw a new design from Egglestonworks, so we were happy to see the Fontaine II ($5500/pair.) The Fontaine has a small footprint and looks even smaller than its 41" height would suggest. the driver complement is a 1" fabric dome tweeter and two 6" midrange/woofers. Like the other EW designs, the Fontaine II utilizes a transmission line.

Zu's newly designed tweeter machined from billet aluminum.

Jon Iverson has a nose. I mean, he just knows—for instance, we were walking through the Alexis Park, I mean Alexis Villas, when he stopped in front of Zu's logo and said, "I think this might be worth investigating."

Esoteric's two-box (transport plus D/A converter) SACD player, feeding A70 amps (not sold in the US), an Audio Research Reference 3 preamp, and a pair of Aerial Acoustics 20T speakers combined to produce one of the smoothest, most musical sounds I heard at the show.

I think it's fair to say that Bryston is one of the more conservative manufacturers of audio electronics, with solid engineering and avoidance of anything that smacks of fads or esoteric tweaks. It then comes as a convincing endorsement of power-line conditioners as a product category that the Canadian company now distributes the new Torus power-line conditioners. Based on hefty toroidal transformers from Plitron, these are aimed at the pro as much as the audiophile market; the top-of-the-line A5AB delivers up to 100 amps and weighs 220 lbs. Bryston’s James Tanner seems quite pleased with it.