The three best lower-cost systems that I heard at CES were this one ($7105 total) and others from Chord/Spendor and Music Hall; thanks in no small part to Totem's founder, Vince Bruzzese, whose extensive traveling has brought him in touch with a treasure chest's worth of eclectic titles that he searched out on Tidal and then purchased in physical form, this one was hands down the most musically enjoyable.

VTL has finally released its long-promised TP-2.5i phono preamplifier ($3750). A completely redesigned replacement for the venerable 2.5, which was in production for close to two decades, its upgrades include shunt regulation and technology trickled down—oh, how I hate that phrase—from VTL's flagship TP-6.5 phono stage. JFET/tube hybrid circuitry is used for the MC stage, and all-tube circuitry for the MM stage. It has what VTL calls "enhanced" RIAA compensation and a front-panel-switchable filter/mono function.

Bet your bottom dollar that most folks involved in the high end never saw the exceedingly narrow space occupied by classical music download/streaming service Primephonic.com. That's because the company's marketing manager, Jennifer Harrington (pictured), and Chief Operating Officer (COO), Veronica Neo, were virtually hidden amidst a plethora of booths in the Holland Pavilion, itself situated over the hills and through the woods and turn right after the house that Jack built and then ask your bloodhound to lead the way to the far-right side of Hall G in the Sands Convention Center and then search and search some more for booth 51.

Crystal Cable isn't new to the "portable cable" market—it has manufactured cables for Astell&Kern for the past three years—but its new Crystal Duet (€700 for 1.2 meters) is the first such cable branded and marketed under their own name.

With everything about its presentation and packaging proclaiming its intended specialness, Siltech debuted its 35th Anniversary limited-edition Crown Princess interconnects (€3500 for either XLR or RCA terminations)…

The sign up above said GoldenEar Technology, but when I walked in it looked like any normal hotel room. No big banners, black cloth draped along the walls or spotlights. And then at the far end I spotted company president Sandy Gross sitting on the couch and a single bookshelf speaker sitting on a stand. That was it.

Kanto has just emerged in the market this past year with a series of three powered bookshelf speakers, a pair of subwoofers and two styles of stands. The company is based in Coquitlam, BC, Canada, and marketing manager Brett Smalley ran through the line.

For now, I'll file this one under "interesting if it were true," since I can't verify the unique claims about these cables. But the main display certainly caught my eye. You can see the sci-fi looking metal enclosures in the above photo that the Texas company's Casey Whitworth says is the Professional Series Elite Interconnect. The large metal enclosures are Faraday cages surrounding the cable "so we can pile them on top of each other and not have issues with the magnets."

If there is one thing that raises the hackles of engineers, it is audiophiles' insistence that power cords affect sound quality. But at CES, AudioQuest's Garth Powell (right in photo, with AQ's Alex Brinkmann) was showing how changing just one cable in a system, the one connecting a Simaudio Moon CD player to a Niagara 700 power conditioner, could make or break the system's sound quality. Playing a track from Muddy Waters' Folk Singer, with Moon amplification and Magico S1 Mk.2 speakers, and without changing the volume, Garth compared AudioQuest's new Thunder cable ($700) with AC cables from other companies priced up to $18,000, culminating with the AudioQuest Dragon ($4000).

Some manufacturers weren't exhibiting at CES but did have suites elsewhere in the Venetian hotel. One such was Audio Research, who was showing the first amplifier to be designed following the passing of the company's long-time Senior Design Engineer, Ward Fiebiger, who died of a heart attack last March. The Ref160M monoblock offers around 150W into 8 ohms and will cost in the region of $30,000/pair.