I visited Perfect Eight Technology's suite to find out more. Jons Rantila, Chief Executive Officer, introduced me to his "music sculpture of glass and gold." Glass is used as an…
search
What does $275,000 buy you these days besides a used Porsche Carrera GT with 20,000 miles on it? Yes, there is now a loudspeaker system with that asking price, which gets you 900 lbs of hardware, including two midrange—tweeter towers, two subwoofers, and two subwoofer amplifiers. Frequency response is rated from 8Hz to 50kHz, and the minimal load impedance is 3 ohms. Furthermore, the Force is made of glass.
Ever listen to a system costing $340,288? Ray Kimber's IsoMike venture put on such an exhibit at CES to preview their DSD recordings with "no limiting, no compression, no mixing, and no equalization." They had their SACD Hybrid Stereo/4-channel discs next door for sale.
The exhibit featured four Sound Lab ProStat 922 full-range electrostatic, loudspeakers each driven by a Pass Labs X350.5 solid-state amplifier. The huge Sound Lab panels—each panel is 94" tall by 40" wide—were placed into each corner of the room and dwarfed recording engineer Graemme Brown. Other products in the…
I'd gone into the DCM room at the end of the day to hear the speaker manufacturer's new Time Frame TFE200 three-way tower, which can be seen at the left of the photo. Using two 6.5" woofers and a midrange mounted above the tweeter, the TFE200 offers a lot of speaker engineering for just $1000/pair. But following my audition of the speakers, driven by Jolida CD player and tube monoblocks, connected with Esoteric USA cables, we were treated to a concert by singer-songwriter Herman Hogan. Al Congdon, the VP of DCM parent company Mitek's Consumer Electronics Group, had heard Hogan playing…
So why is Amanda Sweet from Telarc smiling? Well, in addition to being a wonderful person, she's happy that the Concord Music Group chose to sell its wares in The Venetian. Rather than the nightmare everyone predicted, customers only had to walk 20 steps to the official CES cashiers to purchase their SACDs and CDs from Telarc, Heads Up, Concord, Prestige and the like. With only one other CD vendor—5.1—in the area, Telarc did a booming business.
Jim Wang of Harmonic Technology (right) and Jimmy Ko of Inex Innovation (left) have teamed up to produce the all-in-one Photon Amplicable. Combining the attributes of Harmonic Tech's CyberLight interconnect cables, an amplification system, and speaker cable, the Photon Amplicable allows the user to connect a source or preamp directly to speakers, and to power the system through the cables.
CyberLight cables apply "laser-like and fiber-optic technology to the audio realm....Audio signals at the input are [converted] to light through fiber-optic glass cables and then converted back…
At a press conference on the first day of CES, TEAC Esoteric launched a new range of source components. That was expected. But what was not expected was Esoteric's manager of overseas sales, Kazutaka Tsuda (above), introducing a new monoblock tube amplifier, the AT-100. Using KT88s in its output stage, the 50Wpc Esoteric amp features a new variable bias system and an output transformer using specially treated copper foil as the secondary winding to give the best coupling from the primary. The heaters of the input and driver tubes are DC-powered, to give the lowest noise; in fact,…
In their suite at the Mirage, Nagra introduced the VPS (Valve Phono Stage), shown here under the Swiss company’s well-regarded PL-L line preamplifier. The front-panel switch selects between A and B inputs and mute, while the rear panel features two sets of inputs and outputs and an output level switch. The A inputs accommodate MC cartridges, while the optional B input can be set for either MM or MC operation. Capacitive and resistive loading can be changed with modules that plug into the pcb close to the input connectors. The MC circuit is based on high-quality transformers wound in-…
The Benchmark DAC1 D/A headphone amplifier has long been our affordable digital recommendation, both in its original form ($975) or with an additional USB data input ($1275, reviewed in the January issue of Stereophile). The DAC1 looked a little different when I went into the Benchmark room at the THE Show; "That's because you're looking at the new DAC1 PRE," explained Rory Rall. The NY company has added a pair of single-ended analog inputs so that the DAC1 can act as the system preamp. It still has digital inputs, of course, though the AES/EBU XLR had to be omitted to make the rear-…
For Stereophile writers, the focus of interest at CES are the exhibits featuring high-performance audio (mostly in the Venetian). That's certainly true for me, but I have to admit to being intrigued by the many sorts of electronic gadgets and gizmos that are shown in the main exhibit halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Sands Expo, so my visit to CES always excludes a brief tour of these venues. And, sometimes, in my wanderings through these halls I even find a product that is interest to audiophiles as well as gadget freaks. I found one such product at the Sands Expo: the…
Stephen Mejias and I trekked out to GamuT/Scandinavian Audio Research (ScAR) house on our travel day after the show closed. We sat down and talked to Lars Goller, formerly drive-unit designer at Vifa/ScanSpeak and chief designer at GamuT and ScAR (OEM drivers).
"We use the method I used to employ at ScanSpeak," said Goller. "I have a great team and I give them ideas about new drivers, then I let them work them out. At the end of the process, I listen, I make changes, and I listen again. I don't really measure that much—at least not in the design part of the process. When I say. 'we…