He was joined by Jim Garrett, Director of Marketing and Product Development at Harman. First, they told me that the…
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I had made an appointment to meet Kevin Voecks, leader of Revel?s loudspeaker design team, at the Harman exhibit, which was held in the exhibit area of the Hard Rock Hotel. He was eager to show me Revel?s most cost-effective loudspeaker system to date, the $2000/pair Concerta floorstanding loudspeaker, but I explained that my CES 2015 show beat was products over $10,000. He walked over to another side of the exhibit, and showed me new products from the Mark Levinson line.
GoldenEar’s Sandy Gross emailed before the show about Golden Ear’s new compact, sealed, self-powered Supersub XXL subwoofer ($1999), which would be premiered at CES 2015. The subwoofer has two inertially-balanced, long-throw 12" woofers in the horizontal plane and two fully inertially-balanced 12.75" by 14.5" passive radiators in the vertical plane. In theory, the driver-to-room coupling is said to be distributed more smoothly as the different driver orientations couple to different room standing waves.
The subwoofer is controlled by a 56-bit DSP to manage its frequency response, soft-…
Wilson Audio’s Peter McGrath and John Giolas walked me through the design of the new $15,000/pair Sabrina. The loudspeaker has same general form factor and is slightly taller than their original WATT-Puppy, which was also a $15,000/pair speaker when it was first produced more than 20 years ago.
What's different? First of all, the Sabrina is a one-box design. Its driver component is similar to the WP in that it uses a silk-dome tweeter, a 5" ScanSpeak midrange unit, and an 8" woofer, and a separate chamber absorbs the tweeter's back wave. The Wilson Sabrina was only being shown, not…
YG Acoustics introduced the second edition of their original 2-way Carmel loudspeaker, the Carmel 2. It is said to bring the sound of the more expensive $72,800/pair Sonja 1.2 at a more reasonable price, $24,500/pair.
The Carmel 2 uses fully CNC-machined construction and proprietary toroidal, air-cored crossover inductors. The mid-woofer cone is machined out of a billet of aluminum, and the tweeter incorporates the in-house CNC-cutting used in the more expensive YG line. The drivers are crossed over at 1.75kHz, and the resulting speaker has a standard voltage sensitivity of 87dB/2.83V/m.…
Abbey Masciarotte, Tannoy's representative at CES 2015, showed me the company's floorstanding Canterbury loudspeaker. The Canterbury has a striking retro look and uses a dual-concentric 15" drive unit that mounts a high-frequency compression driver inside the throat of a 15" woofer. The bi-wired, low-loss, 2nd-order crossover is set at 1.1kHz, and the speaker's frequency range is rated at 28Hz–27kHz. Peak power handling is 600W! The Canterbury features an oiled-walnut cabinet made from birch plywood, complete with the Tannoy lightning-strike logo.
T+A's lively and energetic Jochen Fabricius was eager to fill me in on the new, 3-way, 183 lb, $55,000/pair T+A CWT 1000-8 SE floorstander. This speaker uses a 25" by 2" electrostatic line tweeter that covers the frequency range from 2kHz to 40kHz. The midrange is handled by eight 4" drivers while the sealed bass enclosure houses four 8" woofers, each with a gigantic motor structure, an extremely stiff cone, ultra-long linear excursion, and a low resonant frequency. Two woofers are positioned at each side of the loudspeaker.
I was most impressed by these 53"-tall loudspeakers. I didn't…
Lamm Audio used two ML3 Signature amplifiers ($139,490) and two ML2.2 amplifiers ($37,290) to power a pair of Verity Audio Lohengrin IIS loudspeakers ($120,000) in one of the Venetian's largest exhibit rooms. When I entered the room, there were a large number of guests politely listening to the music, including our own Michael Fremer. From the short time I was able to spend in the room, the sound was simply superb.
Naim has updated both the highly touted SuperUniti and UnitiQute this year adding Bluetooth and Spotify as well as other tweaks. The SuperUniti (above) is a just-add-speakers product that includes UPnP networking, wireless streaming, and digital and analog inputs for $6,495. The smaller 30 wpc UnitiQute is below and retails for $2,395
Michael Lavorgna reviewed the X30 (above) earlier this year after spotting it at CES last year. ML details all the spex in his report, so I'll stick to the basics: the X30 retails for $1,695 which includes the remote you see to the right of the box, and also includes a 50 wpc amp and on-screen graphics when hooked up to a display.
The X12 CD Ripper/Server/Streamer (above) retails for $699 and also includes a built-in amp, this time 30 wpc. Clearly aimed at the all-in-one customer, the smaller X12 handles PCM files up 24/192 and can connect to your network to stream from NAS…
Rega has updated their compact DAC with a new remote control and three user selectable digital filters. A pair of Wolfson DAC chips inside handle digital files up to 24/192 via USB, SPDIF or optical digital inputs. There are also unbalanced analog, SPDIF and optical digital outputs on the back. Retail price is $1,195 and the DAC-R is available now.