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Can a show report have too many pictures of oil-cooled tube amplifiers? I don't
think so.
The beautiful Ascendo loudspeaker, imported by airline pilot and audio enthusiast Darren Censullo of Avatar Acoustics
I always enjoy Ray Kimber's IsoMike demos more than almost any other HE Show demo. It's not the room full of pedigreed high-end gear, although he always has that. This time he demoed with four B&W 800d loudspeakers, two pairs of Pass Labs X350.5 power amplifiers, Genex Audio GX9000/DSD-BNC interface, and four channels of EMM Labs DAC8 MkIV DSD feeding EMM Labs Switchman (four channels worth, natch), not to mention a whole bunch of Kimber KableD-60, Kimber Select KS-3038, and Word Clock D-60 cables. Nor is it the meticulously recorded music that Ray has captured with his IsoMike…
Just got back from the John Atkinson/Bob Reina/Allen Perkins jazz trio concert and it was great! Especially when you consider that these guys only play together once a year at the HE shows.
The set included Bill Evans' "Peace Piece," Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage," Miles Davis' "So What," Dizzy Gillespie's "Night In Tunisia," and originals by Reina and Atkinson.
The band had fun and so did I. Reina can be a monster on piano—and was was on today. JA played a popping/slapping solo in Reina's "Sinatra Way" that bought down the house, and where do you even start with Allen…
I walked into Music Direct's room and asked Bes Nievera, "What's new?"
"Funny you should ask, we just got the prototype for Mobile Fidelity's new cartridge!" MoFi's Byron Collett gave me the 411: The moving coil cartridge sports a carbon fiber body and outputs 0.24 mV. It weighs about 11 grams. Price is still to be determined. Oh yeah, and it was designed by Mr. Takeda, designer of the Miyabi Standard.
"Takeda-san is pretty enthused over the carbon fiber shell," Collett told me. "It makes an unbelievable difference in the life and noise floor of the cartridge. We expect this…
For the fourth year in a row, the Home Entertainment Show was the venue for a raffle organized by analog specialty distributor Musical Surroundings. Shown here with the grand prize, a Pathos Classic One integrated amplifier is winner Stanley Moore (center), with Musical Surroundings' Garth Leerer (left) and Stereophile's Michael Fremer, who pulled the winning entries from a box in the time-honored, double-blind manner. Our congratulations to all the winners.
Information travels by jungle telegram at these shows, so by Sunday, I'd heard that I had to hear Nagra's set-up about 50 times. As a result, when I walked into the Nagra/Verity Audio/Silversmith/Audion/Sonic Euphoria room, I was startled to see, not one, but two systems—and the pricier of the two was off in the room's corner with its back to a curved bank of windows, leaving the $35,000/pair Verity Sarastros firing into the room at a more acute angle than I'd ever attempt. It sounded good, though. In fact, it sounded fantastic!
The system consisted of Nagra's new CDT transport (…
HE2006 had DJs Ming & FS, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and jazz from the Anthony Wilson Nonet, alto saxophonist, Zane Musa, John Heard and Company on Friday; jazz from guitarist Chris Standring and singer Melora Hardin, along with the incomparable Dr. John doing his Dr. John thing on Saturday; and my own trio doing jazz on Sunday. But classical music enthusiasts were not forgotten at the Show: Sunday saw the Arroyo String Quartet, joined by soprano Kathleen Winters for Mozart's sublime Exultate Jubilate, perform a fine set. A treat for the ears!
Over at the other end of the Nagra/Verity Audio/Silversmith/Sonic Euphoria room, there was a far more modest system set up: Ayre C-5xe universal player, Sonic Euphoria PLC ($1295), Audio Silver Night Mk.III monoblocks ($9300/pair, 18Wpc), and Verity Fidelity Encore loudspeakers ($11,994/pair), all connected by Silversmith's silver cables.
What was fascinating to me was that this smaller system was an almost identical sonic match to the bigger system in every aspect other than scale. In the huge room in which it was placed, it lacked the big system's sense of ease, but it was its…
Former Stereophile scribe (now PR person) Jonathan Scull (left), blogger Stephen Mejias (center), and surround-sound maven Kal Rubinson—plus webmaster Jon Iverson, Ultimate AV's Fred Mantegian, and your humble servant, taking the picture&151;were having a good
time, about to go out to dinner. Then, in the cab on the way to the restaurant,
Jonathan realized that he had left his new digital camera back at the Sheraton,
on the table that you see in the picture. A frantic call to the Sheraton,
asking them to look for the camera, was to no avail. Then, after dinner, when we
got back to…