The main joy of returning to audio and writing for Stereophile is the pure fanboy excitement of meeting the folk-heroes of high-end and getting to talk them. In one great-sounding room I got to meet three at once: Wendell Diller of Magnepan (one of the nicest humans in the audio schema) as well as Bill Conrad and Lew Johnson of Conrad-Johnson.

Magnepan demonstrated their new .7 speaker with the Conrad-Johnson MF2275 ($3850).

Those who’ve read my reviews will already know how much musical pleasure my vintage Creek 4330 integrated amp has given me. On the first day of CES I got to relax and listen to the legendary Mike Creek show and tell about the Evolution 50CD ($1695) which is really a high-end DAC with a built in transport.

One of the trends in amplification this year is the large number of stereo integrated amplifiers with digital inputs. Among these, the Parasound Halo Integrated stands out for its impressive feature set.

At Musical Surroundings, the Metis line-stage preamp from Aesthetix, first seen at the 2014 RMAF, was running the big demo system. This new 4-tube preamp replaces the multi-chassis Callisto at about $25,000.

For years, I have greeted Rogue's Mark O'Brien with the question, "Anything new in digital?" fully knowing that Rogue Audio is committed to vacuum tube-based analog. This time I asked "Anything new that is not digital?" and Mark beamed. Finally, I had asked the right question...

That was the subject heading of an email that I received from GoldenEar's Sandy Gross back in November.

Sandy Gross and his charming daughter, Wendy, who was at CES helping dad out.

Bryston's James Tanner and Brian Russell (left to right) seemed pretty happy at CES, and with good reason.

Thiel is back! Following a period of reorganization necessitated by the death of Jim Thiel, the "new Thiel," while varying in specifics, promises to respect Jim Thiel's sonic ideals while developing speakers for both two channel and multichannel.