Fit'n'finish were superb—and it was so pretty you just wanted to reach out and touch it. Judging by the smudges on the faceplate, a lot of people did.
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I was not previously aware of Vexo, a Milan-based manufacturer of tube amps, but I was very impressed by the 15Wpc VXSE-KT88/C ($3900). I asked Koetsu USA's Hiram Toro if that price meant the amps were designed in Milan but built in Asia. "Oh no," he said. "Vexo is designed and built in Italy and it is stuffed with European components.
Scaena is a modular speaker design that combines multiple small midrange drivers, each mounted in a pod affixed to a rigid stand, with subwoofers placed elsewhere.The speakers come with digital crossover and high-current amplification for the subs. The speakers come as 24, 30, or 36 pod units and you can add as many subs as you require.
The individual driver enclosures are created from a quartz/stone/glass/elastomer hybrid material used together by a computer-controlled laser. Scaena says this greatly reduces cabinet resonances The towers have a sensitivity of 91dB. Price is…
While I was basking in the sound of Richard Vandersteen's stunning new Model 7s ($45,000/pair), I asked about the tube amps he was using. "Those are Jim White's Atlases—and I think they're damn good." Richard never minces words, so a "damn good" from him is almost as high praise as a "doesn't suck too bad" from JA.
Ji, White gave me the skinny of his 200Wpc Atlas stereo amplifier ($800o). It can also be configured as a 300W monoblock ($13,000/pair). A hybrid design, it uses one 6SM7 voltage gain tube per channel with bipolar driver and output stages. There's zero global feedback.…
Rives Audio's Richard Bird introduced me to Navison, a brand I was aware of but not familiar with. Navison products are aesthetic knock outs—gorgeous wood (or black lacquer), etched gold faceplates (or chrome), and deep black transformer pots. They are audio confections.
Founded by Ben Nguen in 1996, Navison are made in San Jose. Rives demoed the 150W NVS-150 OTL output transformeless monoblock amplifiers ($30,000/pair). The two-chassis design employs a ton of 633C tubes to get all of that juice, but man oh man, did it deliver the goods.
The front end was a Navison…
Over at the Boing Boing blog, it is customary to run a "unicorn chaser," an overly cute picture of a unicorn after posting a post that makes you go "eeeew." German Physiks Unicorn mk II ($21,500/pair) were sort of like that, only for show sound. Ahh, that's better.
Actually, there are different models of the Unicorn, one with a titanium DDD driver; the pair I heard had the Carbon DDD driver.
The heart of any German Physiks loudspeaker is its 360° DDD driver. In the Unicorn, that's the only driver (other models employ a second driver; the unicorn employs a tuned horn and a…
Featured in Magico's second room in the Venetian was the new V2 ($18,000/pair), a smaller sibling to the V3 that I reviewed last May. It combines the same ring-radiator tweeter as the V3 with two 7" Nano-Tec drivers, the latter arranged so that the lower woofer rolls off at a lower frequency than the upper one to give much of the sonic benefits of a two-way design.
Magico had two rooms at the Venetian, the first of which featured the Californian company's new 4-way M5 ($89.000/pair). Weighing in at 360 lbs, the M5 features a ring-radiator tweeter built into the baffle, two 6" Nano-Tec-coned midrange units, and two 9" Nano-Tec woofers, these featuring 5" voice-coils. The sealed enclosure—no ports in Alon Wolf's designs—is constructed, like other Magico speakers, from multiple layers of Baltic Birch plywood. The convex front baffle is machined from a 200lb slab of aircraft-grade aluminum.
Alon Wolf was demonstrating the M5 with hi-rez files…
One of the most impressive speakers I have auditioned in the past few years was the three-way Aerial 20T, which was reviewed by Michael Fremer in April 2004. I spoke to Aerial's Michael Kelly a while back about getting a pair for a Follow-Up review, but he declined, saying that he was working on an improved version.
That version, the 20Tv2 ($32,000/pair) made its debut at the 2009 CES. It retains the earlier version's ribbon tweeter and midrange unit, but features two new 7" woofers, these using a cone constructed from layers of carbon-fiber, Rohacell, and glass-fiber, and said to…
"Now that can't work," I thought, as I went into the Crystal Cable room and saw the Dutch company's new Arabesque loudspeaker (45,000 Euros/pair, equivalent to around $60,000). A glass enclosure? But as I listened to a variety of recordings that I thought would expose cabinet problems, such as female vocals and solo cello, I didn't hear any flaws that I could lay at the feet of the enclosure.
Panels of ¾" glass are glued together to form an enclosure that from above looks like a truncated spiral and sits on a heavy aluminum base that carries the crossover components. A RAAL ribbon…
I walked into Balanced Audio Technology's room and almost couldn't leave. Geoff Poor was driving a pair of WATT/Puppy 8s wth an all BAT system consisting of a VK-D5SE/Superpack CD player ($9500), VK-32SE preamplifier ($8000), and the new 55Wpc VK-55SE amplifier ($5995).
The VK-55SE employs BAT's SuperTube gain block, essentially a 6H30 "supertube" gain stage.All of the VK-55s resistive current sources have been replaced by vacuum tube based current sources and the power supply's storage has been increased five-fold. Higher quality polypropylene capacitors.
The VK-55SE can…