His background may have been in tubed audio product design, but Theta Digital's Mike Moffat is now at the forefront of computer-based digital processor development. His Theta D/A processors are among a handful of products that use Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips and custom filtering software instead of off-the-shelf filter chips (footnote 1). I recently visited Mike at the Theta factory to get his current ideas on digital audio reproduction and what goes into designing a good-sounding processor. I began by asking Mike if he had always been an audiophile.

See the smiling woman in this photo with a dazed-amidst-all-these-rooms yours truly? Meet T.H.E. Show’s fabulous Director of Social Media and Marketing, Emiko Carlin, a former classical pianist and musician whose 3000 songs include some #1 pop singles. I don’t know how this dazzling woman comes across to others, but for me, discovering Ms. Carlin was like meeting an old friend.

Ah, mbl. This time, making music not in its usual large room, but rather in an 11-foot wide space. Mbl North America’s Jeremy Bryan had asked for a larger exhibit room, but none was available. After hearing the havoc wrought by air wall subdividers in many of the Hilton Long Beach’s conference rooms, I think Bryan is lucky to have been refused.

After Emiko Carlin of T.H.E. Show basically ordered me to check out AirHush’s display at T.H.E. Show, I spent a few minutes speaking with company CCO Michael Quinby.

Red was more than the color of my true love’s hair toward the end of T.H.E. Show Long Beach, as I moved from one winning red speaker to another.

It took two tries over the course of two days to find a seat, but on Sunday afternoon, I finally squeezed into the room shared by EAR and PranaFidelity. The wait was worth it.

There was a helluva lot of burnished silver jewelry in this room, and it sparkled like a sharply polished diamond.

To these ears, the pairing of Vandersteen Quatro loudspeakers ($15,499/pair) and the company’s smaller M5-HPA monoblocks ($15,800/pair) with the Jeff Rowland Corus Stereo preamplifier + PSU ($21,900) and Conductor phonostage ($8500) is a winner.

Who would have expected to hear a theorbo reproduced in 24/192 at an audio demo?

If Scott Walker Audio had staked out a mini-empire on floor 3, Sunny Components of Covina, California, did the same on floor 6. The first room I visited, of the four from Sunil Merchant, included Egglestonworks' 87dB-efficient Nico speakers ($4250/pair), ....