Ever since the silver age of giant Japanese receivers, I've always cringed when presented with a feature-laden box of audio parts…
search
I liked the orange Micromega M-One integrated amp at Rocky Mountain AudioFest 2016 more than the silver one (pictured) at CES 2017. I liked it more because it was a rich, good color and it matched the orange Focal Sopra No.2s it was driving. I liked it because it played beautiful music in front of a backlit rice-paper wall. The whole presentation looked, and felt, and sounded so Zen clear, relaxed, and revelatory. I thought it was the best sound at RMAF.
The Acoustique Quality Passion loudspeakers ($20,000/pair) made their way to Las Vegas from the Czech Republic, courtesy of Vladimir Sapara. The flagship loudspeaker in the Acoustique line, it is based on 25 years of loudspeaker design, and features a cabinet by Novague Design.
The 6-ohm impedance, three-way Passion features Scanspeak Illuminator tweeter and midrange drivers, and a Scanspeak Revelator woofer, all with proprietary tweaks. Its MDF cabinet has 3cm-thick side panels, and there are no parallel walls internally. In addition, the cabinet's active internal damping system uses…
For those of you who like all of your functions tucked away in a single shiny box, Burmester has a product for you. The main all-in-one 161 Receiver is based on the company's Music Server 151 and the system also includes the B15 speakers (not shown) and the handy empty case that sits below the active electronics. Burmester says the empty case with fold down front door (shown below) is part of the product since their customers don't like clutter and prefer to store extraneous stuff like AppleTV boxes and game consoles out of the way. I realize that probably sounds a bit pretentious to some,…
There's nothing remotely reticent about California Audio Technology's (CAT's) new CAT MBX 900 Trinity satellite loudspeakers ($50,000/pair) and companion CAT MBX 58 Miramar subwoofers ($50,000/pair). Designed to be used together, their presentation mirrors the strong, driving energy of Brian Barr, founder and CEO of the 27-year old company.
Nor will it come as any surprise that the Trinity/Miramar duo are an excellent match for CAT's Morris Kessler-designed SAE 2HP-D power amplifier, which Michael Fremer reviewed in the October 2016 Stereophile. I didn't have time to sit down and take a…
An upscaling CD Transport. Yes you read right, this CD transport upscales your discs using, according to Chord, "the power of the new Xilinx XC7A200T FPGA, which has a standout 740 DSP cores, to develop sophisticated WTA (Watts Transient Alignment) filtering and upscaling algorithms which can output digital data at 705.6kHz (16 x CD’s 44.1kHz native resolution)." Whew!
The Blu chassis is shaped to fit perfectly on top of the Chord DAVE DAC, and Chord says they had to design these as two separate units since the Blu's Xilinx XC7A200T uses 10 amps (!!!) of current, and needed to be isolated…
The palm-sized Chord Mojo DAC/Headphone amp is arguably one of the best portable audio invigoration devices around, so why not add some more super-powers? The Poly is a networking "module" which adds streaming, network and SD card playback to the Mojo. The Poly is about half the size of the Mojo and snaps onto one end (as seen in the photo below). Very clever.
You can stream from your NAS over WiFi, or other sources with Bluetooth and AirPlay. Control is via an app on your smartphone, and according to Chord: "Poly is compatible with the latest high-resolution-audio file types and…
Due to a scheduling conflict I missed the press conference with power point presentation (you can see the slides here), but having spent some time with Chord's Rob Watts in the past, I'm sure the new products are packed with carefully thought out tech. Pictured here is the new Chord Hugo2, which follows on the heels of the successful Hugo DAC launched three years ago.
Available in both silver and black, casework has been sleekinized and the innards upgraded all around. Inside is the company's latest proprietary FPGA technology (which I loved in the pricier Hugo TT reviewed earlier last…
Now this should be interesting. We walk down the hall to the Nagra suite (in a similarly sized room to dCS) and there are the same speakers we just heard at dCS, but this time with completely different electronics. I set up my laptop, with Roon in "Exclusive Mode" as always, and test that we have sound.
Introductions are made, and Jake shakes hands with Nagra's Sales and Marketing Manager, the soft-spoken Rene Laflamme. With us is also recording engineer and Wilson Audio's Director of Sales, Peter McGrath. McGrath helped with set up in the Nagra room (which employ the Wilson Alexx…
The ebullient Irv Gross, Director of Sales at Constellation, greeted me when I walked into the company's exhibit room at CES 2017. He pointed to the back of the room when I asked whether Constellation had introduced a new amplifier: there waited the 185-lb, 500Wpc Centaur II Stereo ($55,000), connected to a pair of Magico M3 loudspeakers ($84,000/pair) via thick MIT speaker cables. Irv explained that its 500Wpc had grown from the 250Wpc Centaur version by using the power supply transformer from their reference Hercules amplifier.
The Swiss manufacturer Soulution introduced the $32,000, 75-lb Soulution 511 stereo amplifier at CES 2017. Rated conservatively at 150Wpc into 8 ohms, it delivers 280Wpc into 4 ohms and 560Wpc into 2 ohms. The 511 can be switched to a bridged configuration for power ratings of 560W, 1120W, and 2000W, respectively. In addition, the amplifier is capable of sustaining a current draw of 60 amperes at 36 volts, for an impulse rating of 6000W mono. Its damping factor is listed as 10,000 at 100kHz. Distortion (0.004%) and signal-to-noise ratio (>107dB) measurements at 1kHz are excellent, due in…