The No.536 monophonic power amplifier ($15,000) clearly signals a rebirth of the ML spirit with its black and silver design as well as its impressive engineering and construction. Specified at 400W into 8 ohms and 800W into 4 ohms, this elegant behemoth has a fully discrete class-AB topology with class-A voltage-gain and driver stages. There are no integrated circuits in the circuit path.
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All the Harman boys were over at the Hard Rock Hotel rather than the official CES sites, but I was able to swing by on my way to the airport to see the new statement amp from Mark Levinson.
Mark Mason, Vice President, Engineering of Thiel Audio, presented the new Thiel Subwoofer, with a suggested retail of $3000. The small, sealed and powered sub has a sophisticated limiter circuit that allows one to set the sub for "party mode," using maximum output, or for extended mode. Neither setting allows the internal amplifier to clip or the woofer to be overdriven.
It uses a 1000W class-D amplifier and a 12" driver with a 3" peak-to-peak excursion. The sub specifically doesn't use a high-pass filter to roll off below 20Hz, preferring to use a sealed enclosure to minimize the group…
"This is our new top-of-the-line subwoofer," said James Tanner, as he proudly showed a non-playing Byrston Model T subwoofer that will retail at $4795 each. He described why Bryston built a 110' tower to confirm that sub's anechoic response does actually reach down to 12Hz.
This depth of response was achieved by a thorough vibration analysis, crossover refinement, and new driver design. Three 8" long-throw cone drivers, powered by an internal class-D 600W amplifier, are used to generate the sub's 18Hz–150Hz (±3dB) response with a maximum SPL of 108dB measured at 1 meter. The sub's…
The huge $43,000/pair Acoustic Zen Maestro loudspeaker is an imposing 225 lb, 67"-tall, 4-way, floorstanding transmission-line speaker system that physically dominated its seemingly tiny-by-comparison exhibit room. Driven by a pair of similarly oversized 100Wpc single-ended triode Junone Monoblock tube amplifiers, the Maestro loudspeakers excelled in resolving subtle instrumental timbral details that lead to a stunning sense of realism.
Patricia Barber's "Too Rich for My Blood," from her Café Blue album abounded in subtle aspects of plucked string bass, hi-hat cymbals, and the…
Burmester's upbeat and gregarious CEO, Dieter Burmester, was eager to give a live demonstration of his two newest loudspeakers, the $60,000/pair BA-71 and the smaller $30,000/pair BA 31 (above). The larger BA-71 uses four 160mm woofers while the BA-31 employs two woofers. The B71 employs two 160mm midrange drivers in a D'Appolito array around a single front-firing air-motion-transformer tweeter, the B31 a single midrange unit. These speakers differ from the rest of the Burmester loudspeakers because they incorporate a user-adjustable air-motion-transformer tweeter on the upper rear panel of…
Stereophile's Jon Iverson grabbed me in the hallway of the Venetian Hotel's 35th floor. He was excited. "You've got to see Avantgarde's new loudspeaker on the 31st floor—it's full of features not found in most other loudspeakers." I rushed down the back stairs of the Venetian, and found Avantgarde's Executive Manager, Armin Krauss, who walked me through the $18,500/pair, three-way, Zero 1 loudspeaker.
Available in white or black, the loudspeaker resembles a 42"-tall monolithic slab, nothing like Avantgarde's other boxes, which sprout large external circular horns. The Zero One's horn is…
The $80,000/pair MartinLogan electrostatic hybrid, the Neolith, played with wonderful spatial imaging and translucent sound. The speaker's enclosure was painted in a glossy, thick automotive glass red paint called Rosso Fuoco, but is available in 6 other colors.
MartinLogan's Dennis Chern explained this latest descendent of the company's huge Monolith full-range electrostatic hybrid to me. The rated frequency response of 23Hz–22kHz is covered by a 4' by 2' CLS XStat electrostatic panel and two servo-controlled woofers—a 15" and 12" pair—cover the bass. Each speaker enclosure weighs 385…
"Here is a recording that should never be played on this small speaker," said Nola's Carl Marchisotto, as he cued up Reference Recordings choral spectacular, John Rutter's Requiem, to play on Nola's new $19,800/pair Studio Grand Reference Gold loudspeaker. Finished in a vibrant red "true Piano Rosewood" veneer, the glistening 42" mini-tower played the full range of the recording's broad soundstage presentation of full chorus and organ at high SPL with hardly a trace of compression and no strain evident.
The unit's 160mm bass driver had great bass extension, blending smoothly with the…
Brad Lunde, President, of Lone Mountain Audio, the US importer for English speaker manufacturer ATC, showed me this three-way, floorstanding, powered ATC SCM40A loudspeaker ($12,499/pair). Each driver is housed in its own internal compartment and powered by a proprietary class-AB MOSFET amplifier. Its 6.5" woofer is powered by a 150W amplifier, the 3" dome midrange driver has a 3" voice-coil, and the 25mm tweeter is a dual-suspension, silk-dome SH25-76. The crossovers are all active, modified-Butterworth 4th-order, with phase correction circuitry for each crossover point.
The speakers…
Wei Chang, designer of the $3690 Sopranino electrostatic supertweeter that John Atkinson reviewed last May, was showing their bookshelf-sized, 42 lb monitor loudspeaker, the $14,690/pair Mythology 1, which incorporates the Sopranino for the top-octave driver. The enclosure also includes a 35mm soft-dome tweeter crossed over at 1100Hz from the 180mm polypropylene-cone midrange driver. The company offers separate, 40 lb Mythology M1 Stands as well as pairs of white silver speaker cables.
Music was fed to the loudspeakers via Jason Lim's $595 Celsus Sound Companion One DAC, which received a…