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Happy New Year. As we recover from our holiday parties and work through the darkness of the post-holiday blues (Nicole tells me I need a sunlamp: “Just 10 minutes a day!”), the March 2011 issue is moving, invisibly, to our friends at the pre-press and we prepare for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in glitzy Las Vegas. We leave tomorrow and return to the office on Tuesday, the 11th, but, while we’re away, you can keep up with us at our CES Blog (empty now, but not for long). Please visit often as we attempt to cover every inch of hi-fi at the enormous show.
It's Wednesday evening just before rush hour, and the traffic is not too bad passing through the outskirts of LV along Interstate 15 heading north. The rest of the Stereophile crew will be arriving during the next few hours and Thursday.
John Atkinson has handed out the assignments:
John Atkinson: expensive speakers
Robert Deutsch: low-mid-priced speakers
Erick Lichte: amplification of all kinds
Jason Serinus: cables, accessories, and headphones
Stephen Mejias: budget gear of all kinds
Jon Iverson: digital products of all kinds
We'll gather tonight at…
The Consumer Electronics Association made the final step of registration, badge-holder pick-up, easier for CES attendees this year. In addition to registration sites at the Venetian, Las Vegas Convention Center, and a number of hotels, a registration booth was set up in the baggage claim area of Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport. The line may have been 25-people deep when I approached on Wednesday around noon, but it moved quickly.
It felt good to head to my room with everything in order to begin touring the 106,595 square feet of exhibit space (190 suites and 19 meeting rooms)…
The show will open in a few minutes and 5-year CES veteran Rosemarie Torcivia is ready to hand out free magazines and answer questions in room 29216.
John Atkinson readies the 2010 awards which will be picked up by the winners throughout the day.
Company Technical Director Andy McHarg shows off the dCS Debussy DAC with the new 24bit/192kHz asynchronous USB upgrade card, available in April. Current owners who'd like to upgrade can do so for $250 and folks who purchase the DAC from now until April will get the upgrade for the cost of shipping. The fully upgraded product will be available March or April for $11,499.
HRT's latest DAC, the $199 iStreamer, sports a connector to take the digital signal directly from your iPod/iPhone/iPad device and convert it to analog. Power supply is included and the DAC will handle 32, 44, or 48kHz data rates at 16 bits.
Simple and to the point, this may be the perfect starter product for the budding audiophile.
My beat is digital, but I'm particularly on the lookout for music server products. So I was pleased to see that Cary had their MS-1 server on display and fully loaded.
The spartan front panel has a single power indicator and disc drawer for ripping CDs directly to the internal 1 Terabyte SATA drive. On the rear are two USB connectors and an ethernet port to connect to your network. One USB jack operates as the digital out sending the data stream to your DAC and the other is for an external mirror drive or for sourcing files from USB sticks or other drives connected to the MS-1.
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Constellation's Peter Madnick and Dr. Murali Murugasu return with a new digital source component which, at the moment I had walked in the room, had not yet received a name. But by the time I left was dubbed the Cygnus.
Projected price is somewhere between $15-20k with availability in May. Conceived as a do-everything stereo digital source, the Cygnus will play CDs and SACDs as well as files served from connected drives, computers, etc. and also function as a 24/384 DAC.
As always, case design is exquisite.