"The 5 Series stared with Arnie Nudell in 1993 and the Genesis V," says Gary Koh, from Seattle's Genesis Advanced Technologies. "Then there was the G500 and then the G501, G5.2, G5.3 . . . Now I've given up numbers and we have the Genesis Maestro." Retail price is $30,000 a pair and they are available now.

Paul Jayson, president of Viola Audio Laboratories, New Haven, CT was on hand to demo the company's new Chorale Integrated Amplifier. Price is still to be determined, says Jayson, "but we are looking at around $19,000, and plan on shipping in March."

Swiss audio company Nagra won an Innovation Honoree award this year for their ingenious motorized volume control design in the tubed HD Preamp. René Laflamme, based in Montreal himself, describes the product: "The preamp is two channels of mono in a single chassis. There are two Super Cap capacitor power supplies, two independent circuits, and each channel has a single triode input stage featuring a NOS (new old stock) Mullard tube hand-selected by Nagra."

There was a brief back and forth as to whether they wanted to release information on the new cables (seen above in prototype form), but eventually Ray Kimber said yes. Kimber's Lonny Gould described these as "a carbon-infused eight wire cable." No pricing or release dates are set yet.

Rune Skov, sales director for Dantax Radio, manufacturer of Raidho, directed me over to the XT-5, explaining that it is the latest addition to their extensive line of speakers. "And as you can see, it is a type of a line source because we are using multiple drivers. In the X series we normally use ceramic drivers, but for the XT series we are using titanium drivers instead."

Arcam's Scott Campbell was running through the new lineup of HDA products starting with the Integrated Amps. "This is the start of our new 2-channel range. The Player and SA10 are each $1,000 and the SA20 is $1,300. Both amplifiers are new for us since this is the first time we've put digital inputs on the back. We've taken our experience with how to tackle digital noise in our AV receivers and put that knowledge into how to do that properly in a two-channel amplifier."

Gorgeous metalwork award goes to Tom Vu's Triangle Art display and especially the Master Reference Turntable ($39,900) seen in the photo above. Vu is based in Memphis TN, and said that the show marks the debut of the Master Reference Turntable's little brother, the Maestro (shown below), which retails for $7,500 and is available now.

Emotiva's new DR series (as shown in the above photo) is a configurable amplifier that can go from one to three channels. "These are capable of up to 600 watts per amp module," says the company's Damon Steele. "However due to how the power supply works, as you add more modules the power drops a bit. So with two in the chassis, they run at 550 watts each. If you do three, you get 440 watts per channel."

Because Art Dudley is writing a Follow-Up review to Michael Fremer's take on the Audio Technica AT-ART1000 direct-power stereo MC phono cartridge ($4999), I shall replace lots of words with this blow-up of a cartridge whose coils sit at the tip of the cantilever, right over its diamond stylus.

Andrew Jones's first active speaker, the tri-amped Argo Series B51 ($2000/pair), offers 250W of class-AB power in the form of a 150W AB amplifier for the woofer, 70W AB amp for the midrange, and 30W class-A amp for the tweeter. The B51s can be used either wired or wirelessly, but need an external DAC, DAC-equipped server, or other device to produce sound from digital.