Bob Silverman wowed a select but enthusiastic audience Friday with a concert that consisted of two Mozart sonatas (<I>K303</I> and <I>K300</I>) and three Brahms piano sketches. He was playing a Steinway parlor grand that sounded wonderfully Mozartian.

Hyperion Sound Design's Albert Wu holds up his SVF midrange driver. It's quite a piece of work. It has no spider, incorporates what Wu calls "rear pressure reduction," and the flat-carbon fiber plate that I took for a dust cap is really the transducer.

The HT845 single-ended monoblock amplifiers ($2500/ea) were so new, Hyperion had no literature on them. They looked and sounded good, though.

Art Dudley and I didn't so much enter Hyperion Sound Design's room as get dragged in by our ears. Standing in the Hyatt's hallway, we heard some close harmony quartet singing that sounded mighty darn real.

Proclaim Audioworks' Dan Herrington had a revelation one day while sitting in the smallest room of his house. "I was reading old <I>JAES</I> papers," he said, "when I read a measured analysis of speaker radiation patterns based on cabinet construction. A sphere was extraordinarily close to the perfect form, but then you had to deal with using multiple drivers."

Verity Audio had Nagra's CDP CD Player ($13,495) driving its P-LP line stage ($11,495) and pyramidal PMA mono amplifiers ($10,995/pr)&mdash;all connected with Silversmith Audio Palladium interconnects ("starting at $4000/pair). At the other end was a pair of Parsifal Ovation loudspeakers ($19,495/pair).

A tradition at HE SHows is the "bazaar: in one of the hotel's ballrooms, where record companies and accessory manufacturers do a brisk business. Here, Marcia Martin of Reference Recordings shows off their latest release <I>Serenade</I>, a recording of the same vocal group, the Turtle Creek Chorale, as in their best-selling Rutter's <I>Requiem</I> CD.