Sumiko's Norbert Schmied showed us their new upscale cartridge. "What's it called?"

Ayre's Steve Silberman was excited about the new DPS Ayre turntable. Charlie Hansen had hipped Wes Phillips to the then pending debut of the DPS Ayre back in September.

The three phase power supply is pure Ayre. There are three amplifiers, one for each phase. "Essentially, they are mini-MXRs," said Silberman. They are 120 degrees out of phase with one another, and we need to tune each one with a stethoscope to achieve absolute pitch stability. The result?

The ever-lovely Rosemarie Torcivia and Cynthia Fontaine, running the <I>Stereophile</I> room at the Venetian. They'd appreciate it if someone would bring them a decent sounding stereo to listen to. An ipod even.

"This," Quartet Marketing's Stirling Trayle proudly said, "is the T + A Music Player."

The Music Player has tons of inputs: USB2.0, iPod (with control and display), S/PDIF digital coaxial, TOSlink digital optical, LAN, W-LAn, and RS232 for update and control interface.

We were stunned to see Roger Skoff in the Ultralink/XLO room&mdash;we thought he'd retired years ago. "I did," he explained, "but I was asked to design some new stuff incorporating new technologies and more advanced versions of our existing designs."

It exists; we saw it for ourselves! Wadia's $349 iTransport can take the digital signal out of an iPod <I>before</I> the DAC, outputting 16-bit/44.1khz resolution for uncompressed files&mdash;it doesn't upconvert lower-rez files like MP3s, but it <I>does</I> reformat them to 16/44.1, according to Wadia's John Schaffer.

The back of the iTransport fully decked out with XLO cabling.

The new Wadia iTransport detailed above also comes in your choice of hot rod finishes. Well not officially, but they couldn't resist making one for the show.