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Esoteric Wireless Wonder

Innovation comes from surprising places. Esoteric has always focused on pushing the state of the art with their flagship and pricey digital players (the financially squeemish can skip to another post now), but they've also begun to accommodate digital media wherever it may be found.

Though the digital disc is far from dead, streaming media is the new reality. With this in mind the company has created an upgrade for the D-05 DAC which enables wireless streams in addition to the usual wired suspects.

The USB upgrade kit allows wired or wireless transmission of data from…

All's Well that Ends Well

Between 150 and 200 producers of cables and components rely on WBT for their terminations and connectors. Hence, any advance in their line has profound implications for audiophiles. This year, WBT was touting its Nextgen terminations. Composed of either pure copper or fine silver, Nextgen connectors s boast less mass than other WBT terminations, and are claimed to yield superior sound.

In a very convincing demo, genuine WBT terminations were compared with one of the cheap (probably brass-plated) rip-offs that frequently surface on imported equipment. The genuine WBT sounded…

Clean it Up, Baby

Is PS Audio's Paul McGowan out to harness all of the world's AC for musical ends? You'd think so from the host of new power products in his line-up.

Perhaps the most striking is the PS Power Port Premier ($90 for two sockets). Consisting of outlets that boast a special dielectric of gold-plated copper, these tight AC receptacles are said to eliminate every trace of glassines from sound. Cryo'd by Lee Weiland of Locus Design to further take the glassy edge off, they require a good 400 hours to break-in. They also demand a significant outlay of energy to pull a plug out of them. You…

Sonic Expanse

Kimber Kable was more than happy to show off the four latest additions to its very full line of cables. First came the 12TC Teflon-insulated speaker cables, which use 24 conductors. Terminated with WBT Nextgen, an 8' pair of 12TC costs $854. Next there's the Cadence Subwoofer cable, which costs $175 for 1 meter with the best terminations Kimber supplies. Finally, complementing Kimber's HD19 1.3 cable, which costs $239 for 4 meters are the new HD09 1.3 (5 meters for $159) and HD29 1.3 (5 meters for $557). Other lengths are, of course, available. The display in the Venetian may have been…

Swedish Premiere

E.A.R. USA took advantage of CES to announce the world premiere of the Origo cable line from Jorma Design of Sweden. Prices for loudspeaker cables start at $7000 for the first meter, while interconnects start at $5250 for a 1-meter pair. A cable that, I am told, counts Japan as its major market, two of Jorma's lines have been designated "Product of the Year" by a leading Japanese audiophile publication. Jorma's extensive line starts with Jorma No.3 ($1450 for a 1m pair of speaker cables), and proceeds to Jorma No.2 ($2860 for a 1m pair of speaker cables), Jorma No.1 ($5000 for that…

The Best of Obsessions

Kerem Kücükaslan (pronounced something like "Kooshookasslan," shown standing in the center of the photo), former President of the Istanbul HiFi Club, is justifiably proud of his Echole Obsession cables. When I first encountered these cables, mated with Kaiser Kawero speakers from Germany at last year's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I was mightily impressed with the huge, three-dimensional soundstage that the system achieved in a huge ballroom. Playing a portion of Ivan Fischer's R2D4 recording of Mahler's Symphony 2, this system spoke musical truth.

Now I learn that Kaiser Kawero…

Out of the Ordinary

After years of attending shows where Nordost cabling was successfully paired with Raidho Acoustics speakers, I was surprised to learn that the Raidho Acoustics Ayra C-2 ($24,000) speakers are internally wired with Nordost Valhalla. No wonder the combination is so synergistic. Frankly, even a boom box would sound like a breakthrough product if it were wired with the Nordost Odin I heard in this room. Odin ain't cheap—Odin power cables cost $11,000 for a decent length, interconnects $16,000 for 1m, and speaker wire starts at $20,000 for 1m, with the best sound said to come from 4 meter…

Silver Jewel

Upon hearing that I was looking for relatively inexpensive electronics to feature in our blog, Parasound's Richard Schram and publicist extraordinaire Gordon Sell immediately pointed to a static display of Parasound's Halo P 7 multichannel analog preamp. Designed by Finland's Juha Kuusama, the Halo P 7's origins lie in Juha's design for Parasound's first surround processor, which was released late in the last century.

"The P 7 is a pure analog stereo preamp that can be used as a 7.1 channel surround sound preamp when connected to the multichannel analog out put jacks on a DVD…

Have Another Hit of Fresh Ayre

Also revealed were two disc player upgrades from Ayre. Both the C-5xe universal player and the CX-7 CD player now have MP (Minimum Phase) appended to their names reflecting a new filtering option that the company says has no pre-echo and only one cycle of post-ringing. On the back of the players is a switch to select between the previous generation "apodizing" filter and the new MP filter.

Ayre's Steve Silberman and engineer Ariel Brown ran a demo where we listened to the same track twice while they switched between the MP and apodizing filters. The difference was not subtle,…

Ayre's QB-9 USB DAC Revealed

Saturday morning Ayre held a press conference at the top of the Venetian to reveal their latest products, which include a new USB DAC, the QB-9.

Another tweaky USB DAC you say? Yes, but this one takes serious technical aim at the jitter problem inherent in most of these products. Ayre is licensing Wavelength Audio's new asynchronous USB approach called "Streamlength" which essentially clocks the stream from the DAC instead of waiting for the computer to parse out the data. The result is a tighter jitter spec and all the sonic benefits that implies. The QB-9 also includes an…