Loudspeakers from German manufacturer Canton have impressed <I>Stereophile</I>'s review team over the past few years with their combination of careful, solid engineering and excellent sound. CES saw the launch of Canton's revised Reference line. The Reference 3.2 ($15,000/pair), seen here cradled by chief engineer Frank G&#246;bl, features a new tweeter with a ceramic/aluminum /ceramic sandwich dome replacing the earlier version's aluminum/manganese-alloy diaphragm, which pushes up the primary dome breakup mode from around 21kHz to 30kHz. The tweeter dome is recessed within a short waveguide to optimize dispersion in its bottom octaves, and is damped by a small circular plate suspended in front of the center of the dome. The lower frequency drive-units, too, have been extensively revised, while the multilayer enclosure, with its gently curved side panels is acoustically inert, at least as far as the accelerometer measurements Frank showed me were concerned. I was sufficiently impressed to request a pair of Reference 3.2s for review.

<I>Relatively</I> affordable at $30,000/pair, that is, given the cost-no-object construction featured by TAD's new CR-1 "Compact Reference Monitor," seen here with its designer Andrew Jones and compared with the company's original floorstanding and superb-sounding Reference One from 2006. (Across the corridor from TAD, Ray Kimber was using four Reference Ones to demo his new IsoMike recordings in surround.)

I walked into Audience's room expecting to see the usal assortment of cables, power conditioners, and high-quality parts, but I was confronted with an entire Audience system, from a heavily modded Denon CD player to preamplifier, power amplifiers to loudspeakers!

The Wavemaster monoblock power amplifiers ($9000&#150;$10,000/pair) can put out 200W into 4 ohms. They employ an Audience discrete-component front end, switching power supply, and come with an Audience Power Chord. They accommodate single-ended and balanced inputs.

The speakers from Colorado-based Avalon Acoustics have either featured conventional, rectangular boxes (in the less-expensive NP series, like the Evolution 2.0 I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/708ava/">reviewed last July</A>) or the unique, multifaceted enclosures that I first saw in 1990's <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/703/">Eclipse</A&gt;, which are used in the cost-no-object designs like the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1008ava/">Indra</A&gt;.

Taking pride of place in distributor Sumiko's suite on the Venetian's 35th floor were the new Vienna Acoustics Kiss loudspeaker ($15,000/pair). Part of the company's Klimt series, the Kiss is ostensibly a stand-mounted design, but the side-pillared, faintly convex stand is part of the design concept. One drive-unit&#151;the flat, radially ribbed unit first seen in the Vienna Musik, covers the entire range of the human voice, 120Hz&#150;2.6kHz, and is married to a tweeter in its center and a port-loaded woofer. The latter features the ribbed, transparent polymer cone material used in Vienna's line, but has a multiple-radius cone profile to maximize stiffness and minimize mass.

Demonstrating the obsessive attention to detail in Vienna Acoustics' new Kiss loudspeaker are the micrometer-realized alignment adjustments on its rear panel.

"It's like the Pearl but in a more easily digestible form," explained Jeff Joseph, as he demmed the Long Island's company's new Pulsar speaker for me. The stand-mounted speaker keeps as much as possible of the cost-no-object Pearl's qualities, but uses a new magnesium-cone woofer from SEAS with the same throw as the Pearl's 7" unit.