CES: Day Three

The Alexis Park
Packing for Vegas, I assured my wife that it might be cold but it would be a dry cold. Unfortunately, this has absolutely no truth when it is raining cats and dogs, so I stumbled into Quartet Marketing's room chilled and soaked. I felt as though things couldn't get any worse—and I was right. Stirling Trayle pulled a long espresso out of his machinetta and settled me down in front of a pair of the $1150/pair Amphion Heliums Robert J. Reina reviewed in the January Stereophile. Go juice and music: life immediately got better.

The Heliums were driven by the $8500 tubed T+A V10 integrated amplifier Mikey Fremer reviewed last summer and a brand spanking new $4500 T+A SACD 1245 SACD player. The player features bandwidth switching, which allows the user to set its analog output to either filtered output (60kHz) or wideband output (120kHz). I was listening to wideband.

Wooo-wooooo!

No, that wasn't my reaction, that was Hugh Masekela on Hope, singing "Stimela," a song about the train that brought conscripted workers to the gold and diamond fields of Johannesburg. It's a riveting song and the system sucked me into the concert venue, with its huge acoustic and monster dynamic shifts. I was so there.

Hmmm. Okay, maybe wooo-woooooo! was also my reaction.

The T+A-Amphion system really created some serious goosebumps, but it also caused me to do some serious thinking. The rational part of me had to confess that it didn't reach as deep as some of the mammoth systems on display here, but it produced about as much slam as the moderate-sized room could contain. It also immersed me in an acoustic much larger than its own—and very convincingly, too.

Was it the best sound of the show? Perhaps not, but it left me completely content to be where I was, just listening to music and going off on my own private journeys.

Or it would have, if I hadn't drunk that coffee. I had to ramble and burn off the caffeine jitters. I didn't have to ramble far, because Portal Marketing's room was on the same side of the Alexis Park. There, I spotted a new pair of Penaudio loudspeakers, the $9000/pair Serenade, a floorstanding three-way with a 1' tweeter, 4.5" midrange driver, and side-firing 8" woofer.

When I say new, I mean brand new, as in not-50-minutes-out-of-the-box—as in Portal's Joe Abrams changing out of the sopping clothes he wore to cart them back from McCarran Airport. Yeah, that new.

They sounded remarkably coherent for all of that, although I want to hear them after another 30 hours of break in or so. Designer Sami Pentiiila was effusive about the new SEAS Excel tweeter he used in the Serenade. "It's the best tweeter I've ever heard," he said. "The high frequencies are so much closer to the real thing." Even without any warm up, the Serenades, driven by a Muse Model 11 universal player ($3900 with attenuator module) and a pair of Portal Audio's $3900/pair 200W Paladin monoblocks, were something special.

Abrams played "The Blower's Daughter" from Damien Rice's O, saying, "This was the opening track in the movie Closer and I almost wept." Me too—it was like mainlining raw emotion. That's not a typical response to a show demo, much less one with a loudspeaker that was practically cold from its transatlantic journey.

I already loved the Penaudio Charm/Charisma four piece speaker system, but the Serenade is shaping up to be even more powerful a musical statement. Two Finnish loudspeaker systems and two epiphanies in one morning—what's going on in Vegas?

I popped my head into Jeff Joseph's room and saw the final production samples of his $12,500/pair RM55LE loudspeakers. They were being driven by Jeff's K-1x preamp and V5x power amp and what I assumed was an Ayre digital player.

"No," Jeff explained, "that's an Esoteric X-01—I didn't know Ayre was planning on releasing a universal two-channel player until yesterday." Hey, doesn't he read this website? We reported on it.

"Are you kidding?" Jeff asked. "My hotel has dial-up. I'm going to read everything next week when I get home."

Ouch! That kind of puts all of this emphasis on timely reporting in perspective. That means Jeff won't even know that his speakers gave me the fantods until we're both back home. So let it be our little secret, okay? Nobody tell Jeff that listening to the Mercury SACD of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto was one of those magic moments when the crowds and the cold and the caffeine shakes all go somewhere far, far away and it was just the music and the magic and me.

Remember, mum's the word.

I walked into Luke Manley's VTL room, where he was using his S400 stereo amp to drive Wilson MAXX 2s. "What do you think of this weather?" he asked proudly.

"Why, did you do this to CES?"

I just wanted to sell some tube warmth, " Luke said.

Ba da BUMP. Everybody's a comedian.

I was grooving on Oregon's Into the Woods, reflecting upon how stuff does have to be new to be impressive, when Luke asked the room, "That's with our two-chassis 7.5 preamplifier. Would you like to hear it with the new single-chassis 6.5 preamp?"

As if we'd say no.

The 6.5 retails for $8500 and retains the 7.5's 1Hz–100kHz bandwidth and balanced circuitry. Ditto, the two-box preamp's palpability and humongo dynamic range. Luke says the 6.5 doesn't have the big rig's iron grip in the bottom end, but I didn't notice that in the demo. It sounded plenty authoritative on the Wilsons, which aren't an easy load for tube gear.

"That's true," Luke allowed. "We couldn't run them with the VTL 750s, but the S400 works just fine.

I'll say.

The absolutely coolest thing I saw and heard all day, however, was also the tiniest: Arcam's new single-box (What is this, a themed segue?) Solo, a $1600 receiver/CD player/tuner/clock radio that was paired with a teensy pair of speakers, the Altos ($800/pair), also manufactured by Arcam.

Speakers from Arcam? Actually, there is precedent, although it dates me pretty thoroughly to confess that I remember Arcam loudspeakers. I guess there's no point in shaving off all my grey hair, if I'm going to fess to memories over two decades old—but I digress.

Did I mention that the Solo has a special EQ circuit that will optimize the performance of really small monitors? It can be disengaged for larger loudspeakers (read: more conventional bookshelf monitors).

The Solo is one of those products that's too big to fit in the high-end ghetto, even though I was flabbergasted by how good it sounded. Its US distributor, Audiophile Systems, thinks so, too. Look for it is all kinds of non-traditional audio outlets in the near future.

I'm all for that. New audiophiles have to come from sonmewhere&$151;and great-sounding, high style, high value products like the Solo are what's going to create 'em.—Wes Phillips

The Convention Center
A growing handful of high-end audio companies have abandoned the Alexis Park and set up show headquarters in the main convention center, usually in the South Hall. Some, like Parasound, have a foot in both venues, but as the company's Richard Schram explains it, "the South Hall is where I do business."

And business looks good judging from the wealth of new products on display and traffic in their booth. One item that caught our eye is a new Halo-series preamp that was tagged as "2 Channel," and named the P 2, but sports both 7.1 analog inputs and outputs. So what gives with the 2 Channel moniker? Schram grinned a bit then tried to explain that it was like a two-channel analog purist preamp in all respects except that it also had two sets of multi-channel inputs, and eight outputs.

But, we protested, the ability to switch two 7.1 sources in a purist preamp is an important selling point, and the description is a tad misleading. Schram vowed to reconsider, fishing around for a new tag: "how about multi-channel analog preamp?" Better, we thought. Expect the new preamp, with an estimated $1750 street price and possibly new name, sometime this April. And one more thing. Channel separation is claimed to be 110dB at 20kHz!

Schram had something else on his mind in addition to sorting out how to market new products. He explained to us that a sore spot for many manufacturers is the problem of shadowy unauthorized dealers getting ahold of their line, then undercutting legitimate dealer prices for a fast buck.

Consumers can't resist a good deal, but often as not these "deals" can turn into nightmares if something goes wrong. Manfacturers have found that these sideways transactions gone sour usually bite them hard once the customer realizes that there is no dealer service and out of frustration turns to the manufacturer directly for support.

Schram revealed to us that he has instigated an aggressive lawsuit to clean up his sales channel, sometimes having to track unauthorized net and mail order dealers through a network of fake names and bogus addresses. We'll have more on this story in the coming months as it develops.—Jon Iverson

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