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Jadis, Baby!

Some of the sweetest sound I heard in the whole show was delivered by the Jadis Symphonia CD player ($3500), Jadis E-50 50Wpc integrated amplifier ($8000), and Proac 3.8s ($7500/pair).

I sat down entranced by the soundtrack to The Forbidden Games and the disc's owner leaned over and whispered in my ear, "You used to recommend records to me when I worked at Tower."

Shwing!

But for clarity, grace, and just locked in musical rightness, the Jadis/Proac combo just rocked my world.

That's pronounced sheeYEUfn (like that helps) and it's from Norse mythology—Sjöfn inspired passion through her singing. Guru Pro Audio head of R & D, Ingvar Öhman is clearly passionate about his loudspeaker, which he likened to "VWs that perform like Ferraris." The Gurus($1800/pair) are small, designed to be placed near the room boundaries, and were pretty impressive.

I say "pretty impressive" because Sam Tellig had pride of place in the room—he's awfully good at discovering the good-sounding cheap stuff—and I was sitting near two boundaries myself.

But Öhman was…

How to Write a Children's Book

In one easy lesson!

T'ain't Just the Speakers

Larry Greenhill has already blogged about how good the Escalante Fremonts sounded in the Sound By Singer room Escalante shared with VTL. They did a disappearing act that would have done David Blaine proud. I was so impressed, I came back for a second visit and came away even more impressed—not just with the Fremonts, but with the VTL/dCS system that enabled them to sing like they did.

dCS's new Scarlatti stack— Scarlatti STT CD/SACD transport ($32,999), Scarlatti SDC DAC ($23,999), and Scarlatti SCK Master Clock ($10,999)— impressed me not just with what it managed to extract from…

Simply RED!

As you can see from Larry Greenhill's photo, Chord's RED Reference CD player ($28,500) is one sexy piece of kit. The gleaming metalwork, the sturdy clamshell clamp, its swooping lines—it's just gizmoidally drool-worthy.

But that's just the outside—the innards are what's really attractive. Based on Chord's BLU/DAC64, which I will be reviewing in the August Stereophile, the single-box RED employs a Philips CD Pro 2 transport mech, reclocked to a "highly accurate crystal oscillator" and the data are then filtered by a 4096-tap length WTA filter to minimize timing errors and upsampled…

REX Rox!

Balanced Audio Technology's Geoff Poor pats the fevered brow of the REX reference preamplifier ($18,500). With 18 tubes, no wonder it has a fever!

The two piece unit has an unconventional power supply—each box contains the complete power supply for one polarity, positive in the control module and negative in the power module. Further the power module is completely tube regulated and is filtered with custom BAT oil capacitors.

Each input can be customized. Speaking of customizing, BAT lets you change the current source tube in the gain stage with one of three options:…

Maestro Please, May I Hear Another?

I always seek out Wilson Audio's room at the HE shows. Is it because Wilson always gets great sound? It does—but, as the big dog on the block, they probably don't have to attend. The company supports the high-end community, not just by showing up, but by sending Peter McGrath and his fabulous recordings.

McGrath is one of the busiest live recording engineers in the country—I've been listening to his stuff with pleasure, dating back to his classic Leonard Shure, David Bar-Illan, and Earl Wild recordings on Audiofon in the early 1980s. But when he comes to the HE shows, he always…

What the Krell?!?

Todd Eichenbaum, design engineer at Krell, walked me through the design of their new amplifier, the $10,500, 300Wpc 302. The power supply employs a 3kVA toroidal transformer, built-in power conditioning, a current-mirror input stage, a push-pull driver stage, and low negative feedback (8dB) around the output stage. It was paired with the $10,000 Evolution 222 stereo preamplifier.

Krell's Modulare—300 lbs of Speaker!

Krell Industries' new Modulare Duo loudspeaker system was the one active exhibit in their suite, playing music from an excellent sampler of audiophile favorites. Todd Eichenbaum, shown standing next to the $35,000/pair, 300 lb system, explained that the separate woofer and satellite units were made of machined billet aluminum, as with Krell's original LAT-1 speaker system, but the Modulare’s drivers and passive crossover circuitry have been designed for higher current handling. The low-frequency cabinet contains three 8" aluminum-cone woofers, while the satellite section marries a 1"…

In-Power Monoblock from Pathos Acoustics

The Pathos InPower monoblock amplifier ($13,500/pair) is a hybrid design offering 80W (at 0.4% THD, 5Hz–60kHz, ±3dB. It features some of the most beautiful industrial design I saw at the show. Designer Gianni Borinato describes it as a balanced, double INPOL power amplifier, with a zero-feedback, hand-matched. MOSFET output stage biased to run in class-A. The point-to-point wiring uses silver wire. Two triode tubes in the input stage are wired in opposite phase to form a double triode that is claimed to minimize distortion. The design proved its merit by driving the Focal 1037 Be…