Pathos Acoustics has one of the uniquest design esthetics in audio. Paolo Anriolo and Giaani Borinato beamed with delight as Jon Iverson and I <I>oohed</I> and <I>ahhed</I> over the $8000 Endorphin CD player and $1950 InControl preamplifier.

Pathos products don't resemble anything else in the audio world, but the $35,000/pair 150W Adrenaline Class-A monoblock is stunning even in a room packed with other Pathos gear. It's a zero feedback design and it sounded even more stunning than it looked.

Penaudio's Sami Pentill&#228; brought an entirely new line of loudspeakers to CES: the Ambient series.

At the GamuT house, the first beauty that caught my eye was their new Phi3 loudspeaker dressed in drop-dead gorgeous zebra wood. "In Europe," said designer Lars Goller, "anything striped is really hot right now."

All GamuT speakers sport a ring-radiator tweeter. The pointy thing in the middle is a metal waveguide&mdash;the perfect defense against little children poking in the tweeter dome.

GamuT doesn't rent a display room at one of the hotels, instead they figure the best way to show off home loudspeakers is in a home. So they rent a palatial pad in the Las Vegas suburbs, invite us over for dinner (they fly in a Danish cook and assistant) and then we retire to the living room to check out the speakers and electronics.

VAS Audio's Sze Leung is the most consistently <I>up</I> audiophile we know&mdash;he's always raving about his latest listening session or discovery. "This one's incredible," he exclaimed, pointing to the 80Wpc Cayin H-80A Class-A tube hybrid integrated amplifier (approximately $4000)."

Zanden's Kazutoshi Yamada builds amplifiers like Medieval villages built cathedrals: To glorify the quintessence. Jon Iverson and I were lured into his room because his Model 9600s were so . . . <I>shiny</I> (hey, we're guys, we're not complicated). Then we heard 'em driving the Ascendo System Z-F3 loudspeakers. Wowsers.

Bel Canto's John Stronczer made a bold decision to demonstrate exclusively with a music server streaming Music Giants. He ran the output from his laptop to the $2495 e.One DAC3 digital-to-analog processor and then directly to a pair of e.One REF1000 1000W monoblocks ($1995 each).