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I ran into REL Acoustics' highly eloquent John Hunter on the way to the Venetian Towers, and he suggested I come by to hear the REL Acoustics "Six Pack." As it turned out, this was not a San Francisco microbrew special, or well-developed abdominal musculature, but twin towers of 3 stacked, (84 lb each) REL Gibraltar-2 subwoofers ($4000 each) set between two full-range Rockport Avior loudspeakers.
Thiel's new Intellisub was the highest-tech new subwoofer I encountered at CES 2016. It uses wireless control with convenient SmartSub app, which allows the user to control its digitally-processed, Auto-Room correction software. Rory Buszka, Thiel's engineer, explained that the built-in SmartSubXT system automatically adjusts its output based on measurements from 1–40 locations in the room.
The new Thiel sub is a 90 lb, sealed system, housed in a medium-sized curved enclosure finished in rosewood, espresso walnut, high-gloss black, or high-gloss white. It employs a 12" aluminum-coned long…
I made my way from the main 2016 High-End audio exhibits at the Venetian Hotel over to the Harman exhibit at the Hard Rock Café. I was immediately captivated by a JBL Everest horn-loaded floorstanding speaker, its enclosure finished in an almost neon lipstick red, and its front baffle in brilliant silver.
Jim Garrett, Harman's Director of marketing and project management, smiled knowingly. He noticed that I was struck by this loudspeaker's "eye candy." He told me that the enclosure's finish was "Ferrari Red." At $90,000/pair, the speaker's visuals and the price tag reminded me of the…
Bang & Olufsen celebrated its 90 years of existence by releasing a $75,000/pair loudspeaker that had been 12 years in design. Geoff Martin, Bang and Olufsen's Tonmeister and Technology Specialist in Sound Design, played an instrumental role in bringing the Beolab 90 from its origin as a blue-sky project at the Danish University.
Initially, the speaker was configured as a large barrel, 2 meters high, that used 24 drivers, 24 channels of amplifier power, and 24 channels of digital signal processing (DSP). As the project progressed, it was moved to Bang and Olufsen's development facility…
[Note: click here for background on this project and here for how we set up the equipment.]
I'm grouping these two rooms together since we didn't listen to Graham Nash's album in either one, but rather had each host pick something out. We were getting behind schedule, so the idea was to expose Nash to some completely different speaker technologies back to back and see what he thought.
In the Constellation room, host Irv Gross made a bee-line for Graham and exclaimed that he still had his 45 single of The Hollies' "Look Through Any Window". Nash then proceeded to tell the story…
[Note: click here for background on this project and here for how we set up the equipment.]
Graham Nash seemed to know right away that these were the guys that provided the guts for his buddy Neil Young's Pono player and wanted to know all about it. After all, there is a version with Nash's signature on it.
L-R Ayre's Brent Hefley and Alex Brinkman discuss Pono with Graham.
Nash is one of the most curious people I know, so is always asking questions. In fact, pretty much every time I've met up with him (or Stephen Stills and David Crosby for that matter) the…
Conrad Johnson's TEA 2 phono stage was being fed by one of my favorite moderately priced record spinners: the Acoustic Signature WOW XL ($2395) with its own TA-1000 tonearm ($1995) and an Ortofon 2M Black moving-magnet cartridge ($755). The CA150 integrated amp was driving the 2-way, stand-mounted Penaudio Cenya Signature loudspeakers ($4000/pair)—the presentation had this fast forward-moving grainlessness that I found quite beguiling.
After 30 years of dancing in high-end audio, I only met Lew Johnson when I was working on my recent Magnepan .7 review (August 2015), and now, at CES 2016, I finally met Bill Conrad. Worse yet, after 40 years of knowing about them, I have never used, reviewed, or owned a Conrad-Johnson product. I am hoping that will change before the Summer Solstice.
I really enjoyed talking with Bill Johnson: he has a head full of tube and transistor knowledge that I can't wait to tap into. We talked for about 30-minutes, but it was enough to know I was completely enamored with the new Conrad Johnson…
ELAC America introduced a new 100Wpc, class-A/B integrated amplifier with a switching power supply, the "Debut Series DA101EQ" ($499), which looked so Walter Gropius' Bauhaus: Moderne. I was deeply impressed by its industrial design quotient. Hidden inside its elegant 2.1-channel skin, the ELAC integrated includes an "Auto Blend" control feature that measures the nearfield response of your main speakers and subwoofer and then corrects phrase and adjusts crossover frequency to suit the listener's room.
It also has "Remote EQ," which takes a bigger room-sized picture and tailors your system…
In a second GoldenEar room they had a Jefferson nickel standing on edge on top of the new "Super Sub X" bass speaker ($1249 each). The Super Sub-X has two "inertially balanced" 8" long-throw drivers in the horizontal plane and two "inertially balanced" 10" x 11" planar infrasonic radiators in the vertical plane. This force cancelling inertial balancing ". . . preserves and focuses all the energy produced by the transducers in order to more effectively move the air in the room." Well, the box didn't vibrate, the nickel didn't fall, the base was taut and nimble—and the great (and venerable)…