If $250 per tube seems too dear, you can supply your own 12AX7, ECC 83, E83CC, 7025, 5751, 7058, 7729, 6681, CV492, CV8156, or 6057—and add Cool Valve's Eat Cool dampers for $40 each, as seen on the right..

Roy Hall was blunt as usual. "I'm bringing in some obscenely expensive tubes. They're Telefunken ECC803Ses, which is one of the best tubes available, but Cool Valve measures them and selects the most perfectly matched, and then bonds their EAT Cool Damper to them. The result is lower operational temperatures, longer life, and lower microphonics. They cost . . . "

Hansen Audio needed a speaker that wasn't quite as, um, lordly as its $65,000/pair King floorstanders, so Lars Hansen designed the $49,000/pair Emperors. The four driver three-ways are constructed of Hansen's composite matrix material in an enclosure that employs Sound Wave Refraction Distortion Elimination technology. The midrange (7.2") and bass (10.6") drivers are all multilayer composite sandwiches.

What's in a name? "It's a palindrome, sort of an anagram, and an ambigram," said Rob Darling. It's pronounced, "su loose," by the way.

Sooloos is a company to watch, and here's the crew assembled in one room: Angus MacDonald, Enno Vandermeer, Rob Darling & Sandro Pugliese. These guys cringed if we even discussed anything less than full-resolution CD on their system.

The Sooloos display comes with a built-in CD slot for loading your music onto the server. The $4400 Control:One touch-screen display/controller is pretty slick. The CD ripper is in the base—unobtrusively located, might we add? Once the disc is ripped, all of All Media Guide's metadata is automatically entered, so you could, for example, locate any recording in your collection with Phil Lesh playing bass. Oh wait—maybe we should have used an example with somebody who changed bands more frequently.

As we were walking out of DLS' room, we passed Supro Cables' display. "Are those Deltron connectors?" I asked.

DEQX's PDC3 preamp/processor (price tdb) combines an analog preamplifier with a DAC <I>and</I> measurement-driven DSP. In a hotel room with <I>zero</I> treatment, Jon Iverson and I were enthralled by the three dimensional soundstaging of a pair of B&W 805s and a pair of B&W ASW 700s. Nope, it wasn't because the CD player was fabulous, either&mdash;it was solid, but not audiophile approved.

You have to start somewhere, so Jon Iverson and I started with DLS from Sweden. "Are you guys new?" JI asked.