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…
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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.
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…
[Note: click here for background on this project and here for how we set up the equipment.]
The day was getting long at this point and we'd already listened to a couple hour's worth of music, but we wanted a little variety from the floor-standing speakers we had heard to far. So we popped into the Crystal Cable/Siltech room to hear This Path Tonight on a dimensionally smaller system.
Crystal's Hungarian-born Gabi Rjinveld was a touring concert pianist in her youth (she started training at age 4) and she and Nash immediately fell into conversation about music. Perfect. But we were…
In our March 2016 issue, Art Dudley loved the sound of Metronome’s CD8 S CD player, which has USB and serial digital inputs, though I found some issues on the test bench. At CES, the French company was showing this elegant server, the Music Center 1 (price tba), which plays CDs, music from a USB stick, a NAS drive, or from its internal RAID3 array (1–6TB available).
“Bruno Putzeys designed a switch-mode power supply for our new headphone amplifier,” enthused EveAnna Manley, when I bumped into her in one of the Venetian’s corridors. The tubed amp, which doubles as a line preamplifier, costs $2950 and is drop-dead gorgeous in Champagne & White, Titanium & Bronze, or Copper & Black finishes. Tube complement is two 12AT7A drivers and four triode-strapped 6AQ5 output tubes, with custom, hand-wound, air-gapped output transformers. These transformers are user-configurable to drive three ranges of headphone loads, from 12 to 600 ohms. The output…
Graham Nash auditioned the new gibbon X speakers in the DeVore Fidelity room, which featured an LP player with the longest Well-Tempered Tonearm made, at 18". It was great to see veteran designer William Firebaugh at the 2016 show, 30 years after his unique tonearm made its debut at CES, and still actively involved in high-end audio.
In its main room, YG was making great-sounding music with its Sonja 1.3 speakers ($106,800/pair), driven by a Boulder music server and amplification via Kubala-Sosna cables. I had loved the Sonja 1.3 when I reviewed it for our July 2013 issue, but the big news at CES was the Sonja XV, one channel of which was on passive display in a side room. A four-tower system, with the midrange and tweeter tower resembling a '1.3 on steroids and intended to celebrate the Colorado company’s forthcoming 15th anniversary, the 'XV will be priced at a whopping $265,900/system.
The components for a full…