Hmm. The sound was spacious, with a well-defined soundstage. The balance was a little lightweight, though lows extended down to the mid-bass. The system was having to work hard to produce high spls, as the Bryston amps' red clip LEDs were occasionally flashing…
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When I went into the Magnepan room at T.H.E. Show, the speakers were hidden behind a curtain. Magnepan's Wendell Diller ushered me into the sweet spot and started playing some sounds on the all-Bryston front-end: BCD-1 CD player (which LKG raves about in our February 2009 issue), BP-26 preamp, and a pair of 7B-SST monoblocks.
Here's an inside look at Ypsilon's forthcoming phono section (price tbd). Clean layout, no?
Here's the phono transformer that completes the Ypsilon phono section—for them what needs it (price tbd).
The omnidirectional MBL speakers, which use a unique pulsating quasi-spherical array of ribbons, make a strong argument for the benefits of this design approach. Featured in their room when I visited was the new 111F ($35,000/pair), which uses the "Radialstrahler" drivers for the treble and upper midrange, with conventional drive-units used for the lower frequencies. A big change from the earlier version I reviewed in 2002 was the use of side-firing direct radiators for the bass rather than the 111B's coupled-cavity LF enclosure. These are mechanically coupled to eliminate vibrational…
tmh audio's Jim Ricketts was on hand to announce that Bow Technologies is re-introducing their ZZ-Eight CD Player. tmh will be distributing the products in the US.
The ZZ-Eight sports Burr-Brown's new 24/192 dual mono DACs and has a revised analog stage and power supply. They've also taken the popular Philips CD-Pro2 transport and bolted it to a 10 pound brass plate. On the back are two single-ended outputs and a digital out.
Retail for the ZZ-Eight is $18,000.
While bunches 'o companies were hopping on the USB DAC bandwagon, Weiss quietly goes their own way, focusing on getting the audio out of your computer via FireWire. The company also sells professional audio equipment.
Their consumer division's Minerva and Vesta converters both accept only FireWire or S/PDIF and provide an AES/EBU and S/PDIF output, with the Minerva also offering both balanced and unbalanced analog outputs.
President and Founder Daniel Weiss was on hand to demonstrate the products connected to an Apple notebook and using iTunes with the Amarra music server…
"It's like the Pearl but in a more easily digestible form," explained Jeff Joseph, as he demmed the Long Island's company's new Pulsar speaker for me. The stand-mounted speaker keeps as much as possible of the cost-no-object Pearl's qualities, but uses a new magnesium-cone woofer from SEAS with the same throw as the Pearl's 7" unit.
In a system comprising Bel Canto amplification and Cardas cabling, with the front-end Jeff's laptop sending data to the Bel Canto DAC One via a Bel Canto USB link, the sound of Jean Guillou's organ transcription of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an…
Demonstrating the obsessive attention to detail in Vienna Acoustics' new Kiss loudspeaker are the micrometer-realized alignment adjustments on its rear panel.
Taking pride of place in distributor Sumiko's suite on the Venetian's 35th floor were the new Vienna Acoustics Kiss loudspeaker ($15,000/pair). Part of the company's Klimt series, the Kiss is ostensibly a stand-mounted design, but the side-pillared, faintly convex stand is part of the design concept. One drive-unit—the flat, radially ribbed unit first seen in the Vienna Musik, covers the entire range of the human voice, 120Hz–2.6kHz, and is married to a tweeter in its center and a port-loaded woofer. The latter features the ribbed, transparent polymer cone material used in Vienna's…
The speakers from Colorado-based Avalon Acoustics have either featured conventional, rectangular boxes (in the less-expensive NP series, like the Evolution 2.0 I reviewed last July) or the unique, multifaceted enclosures that I first saw in 1990's Eclipse, which are used in the cost-no-object designs like the Indra.
The 2009 CES witness a third type, in the form of the Aspect ($8495/pair). A conventional enclosure is slung between two slanted sidecheeks that also act as the stand. The top panerl is an artificial granite slab that helps mass damp the box. The Aspect marries Avalon's…