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Balanced Audio Technology's Geoffrey Poor proudly showed off BAT's new Solid-state preamp, the VK42SE ($5995). Those ominous looking black cans are brand new state-of-the-art oil-filled capacitors, which will sport a different livery in the production model, by the way. The 42SE features BAT's power supply bypass, dual mono, zero feedback circuitry and it sounds "more tubelike than some of our tubed designs," Poor proclaimed. "It's like a VK42 on steroids! It has more air, more liquidity, and more testicular fortitude. I don't know why we don't have it in the system."
We wondered…
It has been a while since we saw a new design from Egglestonworks, so we were happy to see the Fontaine II ($5500/pair.) The Fontaine has a small footprint and looks even smaller than its 41" height would suggest. the driver complement is a 1" fabric dome tweeter and two 6" midrange/woofers. Like the other EW designs, the Fontaine II utilizes a transmission line.
Jon Iverson and I rocked out to the Dead's Skull and Roses and found the sound big as bright-sized life. It had pep and energy—and, at least in that room, not quite enough Phil Lesh to our liking. We may have to check back…
Leave it to a bass player. John Atkinson sidled up to Jon Iverson and me last night and said, "Have you heard Ascendo's room yet? It has a bandpass woofer that doesn't sound like a bandpass woofer at all—it sounds good."
So JI and I dutifully hied us Ascendo-ward first thing this morning and checked out the System M-S ($36,000/pair), a speaker that mates a decoupled ribbon tweeter that can be manually time-aligned with the bass cabinet, and a semi symmetrical bandpass cabinet sporting an 11" bass driver on the outside and an internal 8.25" driver. Designer Jurgen Scheuring says his…
Parting the colorful wooden beads makes a sound like brushes against snare. I'm enveloped in soft green glow and the sweetest scents of liquor and jazz. I stand in the corner, trying to figure it all out. Two of the tallest speakers I've ever seen — vintage Acoustat 2+2s — climb all the way up to the ceiling. There's a glowing palm tree dancing between them. Along the walls are concert posters and all sorts of album art. To my right is a mirrored alcove, a bar area, holding many varieties of absinthe and other liquors I've never seen. The room is filled with smiles and everyone…
When your company is called Muse, I guess some product names just suggest themselves. When Kevin Halverson needed a moniker for his CD, DVD-A/V, and SACD player, he thought of Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred poetry, geometry, mime, meditation, and agriculture. Halverson says, "It means 'many voices," which it also does.
The Polyhymnia is based on Muse's Modular Audio-Video Platform (MAP), which went through three generations. Upgrades to the MAP platform for the Polyhymnia include: a dual laser OPU, support for all PCM data rates and types, and optional attenuator , ultra-high-end…
Dusty Vawter's Channel Island Audio has made its reputation building high-performance audio components in extremely small packages, but we were still surprised to see how tiny CIA's new VDA-2 DAC ($599)is. How small? Try 4.4" W by 2.65" H by 4.4" D.
Vawter didn't like the conventional DAC architecture, which uses a brick-wall digital filter followed by analog filtering to smooth out sampling noise. "Our design uses only a 'slow roll-off' digital filter and no analog filtering," Vawter told us. "It sounds less 'digital' and more 'analog' than either brick-wall or filterless designs…
Penaudio's Tommi Forss was excited about the Finnish company's new Alba ($4000/pair). "We wanted a smaller floorstanding speaker than our Serenade, but a larger speaker than our Charisma, so we used the 1" SEAS Excel fabric dome tweeter from the Serenade and the 7" SEAS treated paper cone midrange/woofer in a compact time-aligned cabinet."
Penaudio uses WBT connectors, air-core inductors, Alpha Core foil caps in the tweeter crossover, polypropylene caps everywhere else, and Goertz M11 wiring.
We thought they sounded lively and solid in a small hotel bedroom, driven by CIA D-…
Anthony Gallo's new Reference 3.1 loudspeaker ($2995/pair) proved that it's better to set up a room properly than it is to try to beat it into submission with expensive components. Not to take anything away from Gallo's Ref 3.1, which sounded fantastic, but his demo proved that God truly is in the details, sounding bigger, realer, richer, and more dynamic than most of the googolbuck systems we heard today. In fact, one importer, who shall remain nameless, confessed that he had a pair in his living room rather than the costly lines he brings into the country.
The Ref 3.1 has the same…
Stanalog's George Stanwick was pleased as punch with Sugden's new Masterclass components: Masterclass Integrated Amplifier ($6500) and Masterclass CD Player ($5500).
The Integrated puts out 33 class-A watts per channel with bandwidth specified as 6Hz–300kHz!
All we know about the CD player is its price and that is has class-A output—and that it sounded great pumping Nickle Creek through a pair of Proac Studio 140s.