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What's wrong with this picture?

No, it's not the fact that the Sheraton Centre bar is not absolutely teeming with people. They're in the exhibitors' rooms, listening to music.

The answer this question, you have to think outsize the box—or, in this case, outside the building.

Give up? There's something wrong with the picture in that this is the time of the Montreal show, and it's not snowing! A first! It's raining, however, and if the temperature happens to take an unexpected dip...

Audio Research VSi60

What a cool piece of gear: Handmade in Plymouth, Minnesota, the Audio Research VSi60 vacuum tube integrated amplifier ($4000) is a fairly compact unit (14" x 8" x 16") that delivers 50Wpc. Its milled top plate has an inset AR logo, while its striking front panel has super-cool function and volume LEDs on the left and totally caressable, soft-touch buttons on the right.

Verity Audio Finn

Son-Or-Filtronique's Dany Poulin stands with the Verity Audio Finn. Paired with the Audio Research VSi60 integrated amplifier and CD 8 disc player, the Finns, which are rated at 91dB efficiency and use a rear-firing woofer, were making some gorgeous sounds.

The Real Hi-Fi

I adored the sound in the small Son-Or-Filtronique room with the Audio Research VSi60 integrated amplifier, Audio Research CD8 disc player ($10,000), Verity Audio Finn loudspeakers ($6000/pair CAN), and Shunyata cables. Adored it.

To my ears, the system offered an exquisite balance: It exhibited all those audiophile things (imaging and soundstaging and thrilling bandwidth, bass to die for, speed and clarity), while managing to produce the more elusive, intangible emotional pull.

Son-Or-Filtronique's Dany Poulin said the goal here was to prove that "you don't have to…

Box Furniture Co.

Box Furniture Co.'s Anthony Abbate started as an apprentice to furniture maker Robert Martin. A love for music, sound, and hi-fi would soon get Anthony building equipment racks for his personal system. Later, a chance meeting at Max Fish, the colorful little bar on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side, with speaker designer John DeVore, would lead to a partnership with DeVore Fidelity, building John's handsome speaker cabinets. (Oddly, but perfectly, Anthony would later later discover that John had sold him some of his old hi-fi equipment. Their relationship was obviously a product…

The First Spike

Component supports take a variety of forms: squishy, rubbery things; hard, pointed things; ball bearings (loose or constrained); air or liquid bladders, etc. The Spike component supports, imported by Divergent Technologies, were a new one for me: they use magnetic levitation. Now, I'm familiar with platforms using this principle, but these are individual component feet, each with opposed magnetic components. A box of these "Spikes" contains four such feet, and the price for the total is CN$200. I was surprised that magnets could be made strong enough in this small size to be able to…

That's the Champion Wood

Stephen Mejias reported a couple of days ago on the excellent sound being made in the room featuring DeVore Fidelity's Gibbon Nine speakers, driven by a Leben integrated amplifier. I was equally impressed when I auditioned a Curtis Mayfield live album in this all-analog room, played on the Clearaudio Champion Wood turntable fitted with a Clearaudio Unify arm with a carbon-fiber armtube and an EMT JSD5 MC phono vcartidge.

Sennheiser 800

Like many Stereophile readers, I read with great interest, and a certain amount of incredulity, Jason Victor Serinus's rather gushing CES report on the Sennheiser HD800 headphones. Now, I have a lot of respect for JVS's opinions—we share an appreciation of opera and other vocal music, and we're both great fans of Fritz Wunderlich—but, reading his report, part of me was intrigued and another part was thinking "Come on, Jason, these are just headphones, what's the big deal?"

SSI 2009 provided the first opportunity for me to listen to the HD800's, and now I can appreciate more clearly…

The Battery-Powered Veloces

i saw a familiar face when I went into the Veloce room, as Mark Conti, who designed the unusual Impact speakers from a few years back, is now involved in this line of battery-powered amplification. My eyes were attracted by the Veloce Platino LFT-1 linestage in the photo ($12,500), which will run for 70 hours before needing recharging, but driving the Marten speakers in the room via Purist cables was a pair of battery-power monoblocks ($12,000/pair). Battery power? Yes, the input stage, based on a 6922 tube, is transformer-coupled to a high-efficiency class-D output stage based on the…

Monitor Audio Platinum 200

Stereophile readers often wonder about how products are chosen for review, and, as I said at the SSI "Ask the Editors" panel discussion, the Monitor Audio Platinum 200 provides a case in point.

I had heard the Monitor Audio Platinum 300 at last year's show, and was sufficiently impressed that I talked to Monitor Audio rep Sheldon Ginn about reviewing one of the speakers in the Platinum series. The Platinum 300 was an obvious potential candidate, but it had been around for a while, and the new speaker, just introduced at that time, was the Platinum 100, a smaller, stand-mounted…