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I was sure my friend Jeffrey Catalano of High Water Sound would have no products under $2000 for me to report on but I also knew he would play a couple of killer records that would make my day. So I stopped into the Ortofon/High Water Sound room to refuel my Chi. Jeffrey was talking to a customer while I wandered over to ogle the TW-Acoustic Black Knight turntable ($40,000) which sported two TW 10.5 tonearms ($5500 each), as well as an Ortofon A95 cartridge ($6500) and an Ortofon Cadenza Mono ($1219). But I fell in love with this new, cool, 5mm-thick, two-layer, bi-rubber compound mat! I am a…
Before I tell you about the new Pear Audio "Tracer" moving-iron cartridge ($999) I want to apologize to my readers as well as Peter Mezek and Michael Vamos for my half-backed coverage of Pear Audio products at the 2014 Rocky Mountain Audiofest. By the time I arrived at the Gamut/Pear Audio suite—I was crazy tired, stupefied and grumpy. I just wanted to get back to my room. While Michael was patient, excited, and did an admirable job of explaining the Tom Fletcher/Nottingham Audio heritage of the Pear Audio line of turntables, arms and cartridges, I could barely focus.
I felt especially…
See that picture of a well-suited handsome man? That's Keith Martin of Washington-State firm, Vana Ltd. Vana distributes cool stuff like Vienna Acoustic loudspeakers, IsoTek AC line voltage products, Dr. Feikert Analogue (maker of one of the finest alignment protractors), and Acoustical Systems (makers of the Axiom tonearm, Archon cartridge, the Arché headshell, and the $799, SMARTractor cartridge alignment tool). What Keith is holding is the new Blue Horizons ProFono MM/MC phono stage ($1249). I have this substantial little component in my system now (under review) and I am not permitted to…
My experience with the new AudioQuest Nighthawk headphones ($599) was one of highest points of my CES adventure. The launch party was crowded and noisy. There were people I wanted to talk to but I had a job to do—so I went over and gave AudioQuest's first headphone offering a listen. I played Paul Simon's Graceland and by the time I was listening to it all the way through—for the third (!!!) time—I realized: The reason I like headphones so much is they direct my attention to a song's lyrics way more than loudspeakers in a room ever did. I have always joked that I never listen to the lyrics—…
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.
He was joined by Jim Garrett, Director of Marketing and Product Development at Harman. First, they told me that the…
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…