Brooks Berdan Ltd. of Monrovia, CA eschewed the big stuff, and displayed, in two different rooms, "realistically priced Hi Fi Music Systems"…

Sinatra Again?

Eine kleine Nachtmusik it ain't. And yet, in 1992, lightning struck, tectonic plates shifted, and the third symphony of Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Górecki (1933–2010) became a bona-fide hit. Defying both skeptics and logic, a recording of this decidedly sepia-toned work, subtitled The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, by the London Sinfonietta conducted by American maestro David Zinman, and featuring soprano soloist Dawn Upshaw, eventually sold over a million copies, making it the largest-selling recording of modern classical music ever.

My beat at T.H.E. Show 2016 was the ground floor. En route to the audio exhibits, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this beautiful black Bugatti. No information on this particular car was available, but I assumed it was part of the display of tasty automobiles in the Hotel Irvine's lobby and outdoors pavilion, put on by Reus Car Audio Design, Whitledge Design, Wyred 4 Sound, Magnum Automotive Design, and The Source Audio Video Design Group. Pride of place in the car exhibit was Sony's Hi-Res Audio demo vehicle, which had been shown off two days earlier at the Capitol Studios event in Hollywood.

At one point, an attendee approached me in the hallway and said, "Is it just me, or are a lot of these rooms bright?"

There's more than one way to skin a cat—a profusion of ways to hook together audio components in the high-end world of today—and my hunch is that the number of dedicated cabling companies has increased within the past decade, and now exceeds that of any other audio-hardware category.