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Boldly proclaiming that its new the Renaissance ESL 15 A ($24,995/pair) combines a 45" x 15" electrostatic transducer with dual 12" aluminum-cone woofers, dual 500W woofer amplifiers, bass and mid-bass level controls, and Anthem room correction, MartinLogan proceeded to mate it with excellent Constellation Audio amplifiers and MIT cabling. Winning the award as the only room at CES to play me Reference Recordings' rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's Dance of the Tumblers, MartinLogan loudspeakers once again left me wanting for the image weight I usually experience from speakers of this size. Volume…
Aesthetix's Jim White (above right), along with the company's distributor, Garth Leerer of Musical Surroundings, showed off the new, Aesthetix Saturn Atlas Eclipse monoblock amplifier ($25,000/pair). An evolution of a product first launched 10 years ago, the Saturn Atlas Eclipse sports super-matched output devices that effectively lower noise by 40%. Leerer claims that due to careful matching, even the amp's new, less costly stereo version ($15,000) outperforms the former unmatched monoblock version.
In addition, the Aesthetix Saturn Atlas Eclipse monoblock amplifier offers StealthCap…
Here are a couple photos of the two products in the Lenbrook (distributors of NAD, PSB and Bluesound) suite that included MQA. Above is the Bluesound Vault 2 streamer and CD file ripper ($1,199) and below the NAD M12 Preamplifier/DAC ($3,499). Both units on display include the necessary firmware and software to decode MQA files.
The new Aurender A10 should be arriving this summer for approximately $5,000 and should cover just about all of your digital file playback and streaming needs. Inside will be a 2TB drive for storage and 120GB SSD cache to improve playback quality, with Tidal native as well.
On the back are both balanced and unbalanced analog outputs and USB, Ethernet and optical digital inputs. Formats handled include PCM up to 32/384 and DSD128.
I've recently had a great run with Chord products in my system including the Hugo TT DAC and now the small-sized Mojo (mobile joy) headphone DAC. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Mojo is DAVE which the company says is the most advanced DAC they've made so far.
Like the Hugo, DAVE is built around Chord's latest FPGA technology that designer Rob Watts specializes in along with a brand new WTA (Watts Transient Aligned) filter with 164,000 taps. Inputs on the back include USB, optical, SPDIF (four of 'em!) and AES/EBU. Analog outputs include both balanced and unbalanced and a…
Audio Alchemy was relaunched again in 2015 with a stellar lineup of designers including Keith Allsop, Peter Madnick and Dusty Vawter. And it appears no expense was spared showing their product line up at CES. Occupying one of the larger suites, with co-exhibitor TAD, at the top of the Venetian only served to emphasize how compact the products are.
Though there is a complete line of electronics including phono preamp and power amps, of interest to digital fans is the DDP-1 Digital Decoding Preamp (shown at top left in the top photo) which includes preamp functions, DAC and…
One of my favorite new digital products, from an industrial design point of view, is the new all-in-one system from French company Micromega, designed by Daniel Schar. Assuming you have a nice flat place to put it (flat or on a wall), you can request a custom finish or go with standard black or bright orange as shown in the photo.
The M-One is essentially a streaming device that has a 100/watt per channel stereo class A/B amplifier built in. It will handle pretty much any digital source including PCM up to 24/384, DXD, DSD, Airplay and Bluetooth aptX. On the back are SPDIF,…
CES being quite hectic and hotel rooms being what they are, I try not to do too much listening on the 29th and 30th floors of the Venetian (there are exceptions and the upper suites are a different story, sound-wise). But Vincent Galbo in the MSB room on floor 29 politely insisted I listen to the new Select DAC on the YG speakers they had set up, driven by MSB amps. He played a CD and it was some of the best sound I've ever heard at a show!
The new $89,995 DAC is, in my opinion, the most beautifully designed MSB product to date, with a seamless, softly-rounded (but serious-looking) case…
For some reason I liked this product the moment I saw it. And at $1,099, including a lifetime full Roon license (for $1,000 you get a lifetime limited Roon license), it became even more interesting once I started digging into the features. Essentially, you can run Roon on your tablet and use the DS-S101 as your endpoint without the need for a computer.
This means you can hook up to your NAS drive, Tidal, AppleTV, or whatever else Roon supports, to the ELAC and be off and running. On the back are two sets of analog outputs and also digital outputs (SPDIF and optical) which, if I…
[Note: click here for background on this project and here for how we set up the equipment.]
We had spent the morning and early afternoon listening to systems in the big suites, and now it was time to downscale the room size and budget a bit. I promised Graham Nash that we'd try to mix up the types of products he heard, so we headed down to DeVore Fidelity on the 30th floor of the Venetian.
John DeVore is what I think of as a bespoke speaker designer, creating products that strongly reflect his personal vision about music, craftsmanship and aesthetics. I reckoned his room would be…