Elina Lamm spinning discs in the very smooth <a href="http://www.lammindustries.com/">Lamm Industries</a> suite. It gets my vote for Most Comforting Music at the Show.

I could barely make my way into the Totem room. The crowd stretched out into the hall. When I finally found some space, I made sure to have some fun.

Bluebird Music's Jay Rein, with the very cute Neat Motive loudspeaker ($1995/pair) in the foreground.

"At first, we didn't want to sell these speakers," admitted Jay Rein of the adorable Neat Motives. "I mean, who needs another nineteen hundred dollar speaker?"

Jenna Russo, Lucette Nicoll, and Erika Pearson (L to R) keep the press room stocked with coffee and cookies so that we can keep working hard.

Direct-marketer Aperion Audio was demonstrating its new $750/pair 533-T tower loudspeaker, built around two 5.25" mid/bass drivers and a 1" silk-dome tweeter. Aperion's cabinets employ 1" MDF and internal bracing, so they're extremely rigid. Aperion not only offers 30-day in-home auditions, but they pay return shipping if you choose not to buy&mdash;and they even offer a one year trade-up policy that refunds 100% of the cost of a speaker if you buy a better speaker from them.

Ping Gong, AAA Audio's energetic director, shyly told me he had brought "something special" to the show. Knowing AAA's penchant for high-value, low-cost hi-fi, I expected something modest, but impressive. What he <I>had</I> brought was just flat-out impressive.

For me, the highlight of HE2006 so far was sitting on the podium next to the <A HREF="http://www.eff.org">Electronic Frontier Foundation</A>'s senior intellectual property attorney Fred Von Lohmann as he analyzed the threat restrictive digital rights management (DRM) poses to innovation of precisely the sort so beloved by us audiophiles.

Bob Reina stopped me in the halls and asked, "Have you heard the water-cooled triodes?" Huh? Turns out the $59,000/pair Von Gaylord Audio Uni Signature Editions monoblock power amplifiers use exterior transmission-grade tubes submerged in an oil coolant, I presume and you can really see the thermal motion of the coolant, so I'm guessing the tubes run <I>hot</I>.

VTL announced a major upgrade to their TL-7.5 Reference Linestage Preamplifier (current gain technology, with dramatically lower noise floor), which is now the TL-7.5 Series II. They also have an upgraded version of the MB-450 monoblocks and a new 250Wpc MB-185. Pictured: VTL’s Bea Lam with the system that featured the TL-7.5/MB-450 combo driving Wilson Sophia 2s. Lovely sound.