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Unity, What a Concept

We'd heard of Aurum Acoustics, of course. We read Stereophile and were impressed by Art Dudley's account of his adventures with the Integris 300B Active loudspeakers.

Now Aurum's Derrick Moss has applied some of the same principles to the $13,500 Integris CDP CD player-preamplifier. It's a top-loading CD player with an Anagram Technologies Quantum sample-rate converter, has 11 inputs (five digital, three RCA, two XLR balanced), and has slots for a phono module ($2500) and headphone amplifier ($1000).

Driving the 300B Active loudspeakers, it sounded fabulous. Immense,…

Blue Note 45s

The first two pressings from Music Matters Jazz arrived the other day. This is the new audiophile company that reissues classic stereo albums from the Blue Note catalogue on two slabs of 180-gram vinyl mastered at 45 rpm, packaged in a gatefold cover with not only a facsimile of the original cover but, inside, five finely reproduced photos from the session, taken by Blue Note’s masterly inhouse photographer, Francis Wolff. This is exciting stuff for jazz-loving audiophiles.

That said, the rollout leaves me lukewarm. The first two albums are Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Big Beat and…

Total Feast

"What have you heard that’s good at THE Show?" I asked the fabulous Kara E. Chaffee of deHavilland Electronics. "I'm heading to Joe Cohen's The Lotus Group,” she replied. "I've been told I've got to hear the new Feastrex speakers."

So do you. To say I was blown away is an understatement. Never ever did I expect that the single driver that comprises the Feastrex D9e 9" Field Coil Speaker ($35,000/pair), which was housed in an unfinished prototype cabinet and internally wired with PranaWire Nataraja speaker cable, could possibly transmit the entire range of Gustav Mahler's Symphony 2…

Please Don’t Stop

Choose a door, any door. Confronted with three entirely different systems in the Norvinz room, for some reason I ignored my usual inclinations and moved to the far right. There I encountered veteran electrostatic guru Roger Sanders, formerly of Innersound, who now markets Sanders Sound Systems products online and through Norvinz.

Sanders has just unveiled the not-to-be-missed, must-audition Sanders Sound Systems Model 10A electrostatic hybrid speakers ($12,995/pair). Extending down to 22Hz, and capable of playing some pretty loud music, the 10As feature adjustable midrange and…

B&W's Zeppelin plays Tal Wilkenfeld

"Wow, that's great," I said, looking down at B&W's new $599 Zeppelin iPod player, the football-shaped Zeppelin, as it played a track from Tal Wilkenfeld's new Transformation album off of my Apple iPhone. Tal Wilkenfeld, a 21 year-old, very pretty, Australian girl, was all the buzz after she played bass with Jeff Beck at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Festival Concert in Chicago last summer.

"Yes," said B&W's Chris Smith, "it's impressive how we've incorporated both tweeters and a woofer into this system. The iPod docking portion is made out of stainless steel. And as you may…

YG's Kipod Speaker

"The best loudspeaker on earth!" proclaimed the sign for the YG Acoustics Limited Exhibit. The company's founder, designer, and CEO, the ever-upbeat Yoav Geva, was just as proud as the papa of his new $33,000/pair "Kipod" floorstanding speaker. And proud he should be. "Kipod means hedgehog," he told me, "which is my daughter's nickname because of her hairstyle."

The speaker has two parts, a two-way upper "main module," and a lower woofer section, which when added, comprises the "studio" version of the Kipod. Driven by Krell Full Power Balanced amplifiers and a dCS player, the sound…

An Audio Oasis

VTL's room is always an oasis at shows, playing music at levels that actually match rather than trying to impress the listener with mere volume, the system meticulously set up. The same was true at CES 2008, a pair of Wilson WATT/Puppy 8s being driven by the new MB450 Series II tubed monoblocks ($9500/pair), the "budget-priced" (a mere $50k) Continuum Criterion turntable, and VTL's new TP6.5 phono section ($8500) as the source. The MB450 and other VTL components are pictured here with the company's co-owner, the ever-gracious Bea Lam.

World’s First Noise-Canceling Digital Headphones

The Sony booth had a lot of interesting products on display, but hardly anything specifically dealing with audio. Last year, the only product I found I could find in the Sony booth that I could mention in my CES blog was a pair of headphones. This year, the product that I spotted that I thought would be interesting to Stereophile readers was "a pair of headphones!"

No, these were not the same headphones, but the new MDR-NC500D ($399), the "World’s First Noise-Canceling Headphones using digital technology for precise noise reduction." I listened to them, and although it was…

Esoteric X-05 SACD/CD player

Esoteric unveiled its new X-05 SACD/CD player ($5600), which employs a new VRDS-NEO "VMK-5" drive mechanism that includes a precision machined aluminum turntable and a polycarbonate clamping mechanism. The VMK-5 is said to be extremely rigid and optimized for SACD's high-rotation speeds.

The X-05 also uses Esoteric's new lens tracking system, which mounts the laser-pickup assembly on a shaft to ensure that the laser optical axis is always centered on the the pit track. Esoteric credits this with a huge amount of the mechanical performance of the X-05.

The X-05's D/A…

Your Cell Phone Defines Who You Are?

The day before CES opens is designated Press Day, with press conferences scheduled every hour, including presentations by major consumer electronics manufacturers such as Pioneer, Toshiba, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony. These are extremely well-attended, to the point that last year some of the press conferences were so full that members of the audio/video specialty press ended up being turned away. As Wes Phillips noted in a recent news story, for the 2008 Show CES announced that, to deal with this problem, it would be more stringent in determining who gets a Press badge.…