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Heady Sound from PSB and NAD

Paul Barton of PSB was on hand to demonstrate the RoomFeel technology he uses in his headphones. "Headphone listeners listen to recorded music that was designed to be heard in a room," he said. Therefore, his RoomFeel technology adds a simulated room response to music.

Barton, who designs for NAD and Bluesound as well as PSB, conducts research for his 45-year-old company at the National Research Council in Ottawa. Shown were PSB feed-back and feed- forward noise-cancelling headphones ($399), with the latest Bluetooth technology, whose aptX-HD algorithm enables 24/48 transmission.

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Dali and PSB Side by Side

With Dali and PSB—not to mention NAD and Bluesound—all distributed by Lenbrook, at CES the white Dali Callisto System active tower loudspeakers with SoundHub (target base price $5500/pair, available by early May) sat beside black PSB Imagine T3 speakers ($7499/pair). The Callisto system with SoundHub offers wireless HD audio transfer to the speakers, has numerous inputs including Bluetooth AptX-HD—"you can connect anything" is the claim—multiple outputs, two modular expansion ports, auto sensing source select, and Bluetooth remote control.

The SoundHub serves as both a preamplifier and…

Audioengine A5+ Wireless Speakers

The wireless version of Audioengine's highly regarded A5+ loudspeakers ($499/pair in black or white, $569 in bamboo) uses aptX HD Bluetooth to transmit signals up to 24/48. Performance has been improved, the tweeter has shifted to the cabinet's center, and there is also a cute little remote.

Klipsch Heritage Series

"All products in the Heritage Series are built in the Klipsch factory in Hope Arkansas," the company's Kerry Geist begins. Klipsch has chosen to only demo the Heritage stuff here in the Venetian, with the bulk of their contemporary line back at the main convention center. And the room is quite crowded, so they clearly understand their demographic.

For those new to the hobby, the Klipsch legacy goes back decades with the original "K-Horns" as Geist calls them, appearing just after WW2. Those expecting faithful reproductions of the early models will be slightly disappointed however, as…

Vandersteen Audio M5-HPA Monoblock Amplifier

Richard Vandersteen, hailing from Hanford, California, was on hand to show off his new creation, the M5-HPA monoblock amplifier. Vandersteen notes that this is a high-pass amplifier, not intended to go full-range, for a system that would also include a subwoofer. The selectable high pass settings are 20Hz, 40Hz, 80Hz, 100Hz or 200Hz. The 80 and 100 Hz settings are optimized to work with Vandersteen subwoofers.

"The best thing about high-passing a speaker is getting that low frequency load out of the amp and getting all of that energy out of the main speakers, which cleans things up a lot…

DeVore Fidelity Gibbon Super 9

Shown here is the new DeVore Fidelity Gibbon Super 9 ($9,900 pair) which falls in between the company's big Gibbon 10 3-way and the Gibbon 88 smaller 2-way floorstander.

"This is a 2 and a half way," says DeVore, "and the goal with this speaker was to get as much of the performance of the big Gibbon 10 in a smaller package and make it significantly easier to place in a room." DeVore adds that the speakers are very easy to drive with a 91dB sensitivity and "nice even 8 ohm load." They've also been designed for a wide sweet spot and in fact the demo pair were not toed in at all but were…

Soundots

This is hands down my favorite new "Concept of Show". Here is a small powered speaker coming out of Sweden that has some surprising tricks up its sleeve. You can see from the photo that these are not big speakers, but they have a unique method of overcoming this limitation.

"What we have here is a scalable speaker system," Soundots Frederik Gunnarsson begins. "You can scale the performance depending on how many units you put together. You can put them on top of each other . . ." And as Gunnarsson said this he moved two speakers next to each other which then magnetically snapped together…

Is M&K the High End's Best-Kept Secret?

I really don't know the answer; I just know that loudspeaker company M&K says that's the case. I also know that the original Miller & Kreisel was founded in 1973 by music lovers who wanted to manufacture speakers good enough to do justice to recordings by Steely Dan. 35 years later, the company went bankrupt, and was relaunched shortly thereafter by new Danish investors who have a strong home theater orientation. For the past 10 years, the company's owner has been Lars Johansen, who spoke with me in their room in the Venetian Hotel.

M&K was showing two 4 ohm models. Shown on…

Earphones by Etymotic

Etymotic's Albert Arends was showing four models of the company's earphones. The Etymotic ER3SE (Studio Edition—$179) has a flatter response than the ER3XR (Extended Response—$179), which has "a bit of a bass lift" in the 100Hz-1kHz region. One major difference between these models and the higher level ER4 SR (Studio Reference—$349) and ER4XR (Extended Response—$349) is that only the latter are channel-matched to within 1dB.

All earphones have detachable cables and metal anodized bodies, and come with four differently sized eartips that are claimed to accommodate 98% of ear canals. The…

SAE and Eggleston Works

I spent some time listening to systems from two companies of which Brian Barr is President: SAE (Scientific Audio Electronics) and CAT (California Audio Technology). In the first, two SAE 2HP-D amplifiers ($20,000/each), which graced the cover of Stereophile when Michael Fremer reviewed the amp in the October 2016 issue, drove new bi-amped Eggleston Works 20th anniversary Limited Edition Andra Viginti speakers ($40,000/pair). Michael is currently reviewing these speakers, whose 4 ohm nominal impedance indicates that they were driven by a mere 1200Wpc of SAE power.

Sharing space on an XTC…