Jake was going to hear his music for the first time on a system totaling over half a million dollars.
You could see the wide smile on Jake's face when he…
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While the dCS and Nagra suites at the Mirage approximated the size of a typical medium sized living room, the YG suite at the top of the Venetian was something else entirely. The room was quite large, the speakers human size, and a bigger crowd was also on hand. Lori Lieberman was playing on the system as we walked in and YG's Director of Sales, Dick Diamond greeted us with a big smile and helped me get the laptop connected.
The Philharmonia loudspeaker ($50,000/pair), designed by Jean Nouvel and the French audio-engineering firm Amadeus, is the first consumer-level product from a company whose specialty is studio monitors. As it turns out, Jean Nouvel designed the 2400-seat Le Philharmonie de Paris, home of L'Orchestre de Paris. The speaker's electronics were designed by the orchestra's chief recording engineer.
Imported by Source Systems, these are active loudspeakers that include two 700W amplifiers per tower. The speaker, whose cabinet is made of 500 layers of birchwood, includes custom DSP software…
Shown in prototype form, without logos, Realization is Kubala-Sosna's new flagship cable line. With introductory pricing in effect until July, interconnects and speaker cable are $10,000/1m pair, and cost $1800 for each additional meter. Prices will rise to $11,000/$2000.
Seen here holding the cables is their usually unseen chief designer, Howard Sosna. Howard is an oral maxillofacial surgeon who performs his "day job" 65 hours per week, and designs cables at 2am and on Sundays. Someone who's been involved in audio all his life, he started Kubala-Sosna with Joe Kubala in 2002–2003.
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When I returned to audio after a 12-year sabbatical, the first things I noticed were hi-rez downloads, high-quality headphones, class-D, G, and H operation of amplifiers, and the upscale-looking but low-priced products of Emotiva. I also noticed that the average price of quality audio gear had quadrupled (at least). Right away I knew I didn’t want to write audio porn about glitzy boxes at oligarch prices. Emotiva looked so direct-sales, street-wise smart—and everybody was talkin’ about how musical Emotiva’s stuff sounds: “It sounds good—and they're givin’ it away!” I couldn’t wait to try one…
Right now it appears that both Europe and America are cultivating a new, more refined vision of what a tube audio amplifier should look and sound like. Both sides of the Atlantic are making tube products that (again) sound at least a little like actual vacuum tubes and less like high-strung solid-state racing cars. Both cultures now want genuine tube sound but demand 21st century tube longevity and reliability—and, of course, a discrete headphone amplifier.
The new V 80 SE integrated amplifier ($10,500) from Germany's Octave Audio is just such a creation. It delivers 120Wpc (into 4 ohms…
One of the chief reasons I fly to woebegotten Las Vegas, USA is: I love all the wild, eccentric audio persons that treat CES as a business-building pilgrimage site. The other is that CES is the best place to find new products to review. This year I found several, and the one that has me the most stoked is the Rogers High Fidelity 65V-1 class-A, single-ended EL34/KT88 integrated amplifier ($3999). Not to mention: I have never seen an amp painted with industrial-black crinkle paint that I didn't love.
I have met Rogers' president and chief designer Roger Gibboni several times, at his New…
Technics displayed their Reference Series product line at CES 2017. While the New York Times recently focused on the introduction of the company's SL-1200G coreless-motor direct-drive turntable ($4,000), my interest focused on Technics' 188-lb, $17,000 SE-R1 digital amplifier, which I heard powering their SB-R1 3.5-way floorstanding speakers. Bill Voss, Technics' Business Development Manager, explained that the SE-R1 is rated at 300Wpc into 4 ohms (the load impedance of the SB-R1 speakers). The amplifier uses a pulse-width modulation circuit, a high-precision sample-rate converter for…
I'm an old friend of DeVore Fidelity's founder and chief engineer, John DeVore. So old that every time I see him, my mind says, silently, "John-Knee Dee-Vore," and I immediately picture one of the Monkeyhaus parties held in his listening room/factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At almost the same moment, I picture our mutual friend and Tone Imports proprietor, Jonathan Halpern, putting a Hank Williams 78 on the Monkeyhaus turntable—but I never want to call Jonathan "John-Knee Help-Porn." No way. Now that he is importing two of my favorite British audio brands—Falcon Acoustics and Sugden Audio—…
Miracle of miracles, as I walked down the hallways of the Venetian's 30th floor, checking every sign, it seemed that I had covered virtually everything in my territory. In point of fact, as I discovered after the show, I actually missed the Bluebird Music Suite, which sat isolated on the 34th floor, with its debut van den Hul cable beyond the reaches of my Vegas-pummeled vision. Happily, Jon Iverson took that room in, which makes me glad that I felt free enough to spend some quality time listening to Yoav Geva's magnum opus, the YG Acoustics Sonja XV loudspeakers with included sub towers ($…
Turns out the Venetian's Grand Lux Cafe has a decent kale and brown rice salad, which three in our group quickly ate in Stereophile's hospitality room on the 29th floor. After lunch we headed up one floor to the Simaudio room where we were greeted by Lionel Goodfield and the Moon Units (sorry couldn't resist). Simaudio's room is at the back corner of one of the wings, and though much smaller than the suites on the top floors, is still twice as big as the regular rooms on their floor.
And the company had put their space to very good use. When we walked in, some loud electro music was…