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In the back room, O'Hanlon was running a demo with the Luxman D-06a playing his show mix CD. The Luxman retails for $9,900 and employs a pair of BurrBrown PCM1792A chips in a dual-mono setup. The USB input on back accepts PCM up to 32/384 and DSD to 5.6MHz, while SPDIF and optical accepts up to 24/192 PCM. Both balanced and unbalanced analog audio and SPDIF and optical digital out on the back.
Last year Bruno Putzeys simply held up a layered stack of circuit boards when describing his new DAC, but this year we were able to hear the DAC in Philip O'Hanlon's On a Higher Note room, shown above in the Makua preamp, with the bottom cover off and LEDs all aglow.
This is a fully discrete design, meaning even the digital section is built on circuit boards and does not include an off-the-shelf DAC chip. Putzeys said that all incoming audio is first upsampled to 32/3.125MHz and then converted to noise-shaped PWM. From the Mola Mola website: "The two remaining boards are mono DACs, in…
Ayre has been getting major exposure for their work with Pono, but have also been working on their own breakthrough device which grew out of that project, the Codex. Due to hit retailers in March for $1,500, inside will be an ESS Sabre ES9018 DAC chip that will handle PCM up to 32/384 and DSD128.
The Codex features a discrete, balanced, zero-feedback design and will have USB and SPDIF on the back! Also included are both balanced and unbalanced outputs and a single 1/4 inch and two 3.5mm headphone jacks on the front (which can be set up for balanced headphone designs). The three digit…
Rega introduced its first low-output moving-coil cartridge, the Apheta, in 2006, but it got mixed reviews, due to a high-frequency peak at the top of the audioband. Rega showed the Apheta 2 ($1895) at CES, mounted on the vestigial RP10 turntable. The Apheta 2 has benefited from some serious production engineering and has a lower moving mass, the latter moving the treble peak higher, to 18kHz or so.
On a system featuring PMC twenty6 speakers, a Rega Osiris integrated amplifier and an Ios photo stage, the Apheta 2 worked sonic wonders with a Boz Scaggs track.
Rega is surfing the…
Danish speaker manufacturer Gamut showed its new RS7 speaker at CES. Costing $39,900/pair, the RS7 is basically the smaller RS5 ($31,990/pair) that I favorably reported on in our 2014 RMAF report with an extra woofer mounted above the tweeter to give a full three-way design. The beautifully profiled cabinet is made from compressed layers of veneer to give a rigid but well-damped enclosure.
With the RS7s driven by Gamut's own amplification and unique, leather-covered speaker cables, Gary Karr's double-bass reading of Albinoni's Adagio sounded rich and detailed, with well-defined imaging.…
Going into the Audio Arts room at CES was like going through a time portal into the 1986 CES, as Flim and the BB's classic album Tricycle was playing. The system was based on the top-line Zellaton speakers ($79,750/pair) driven by Swiss CH amplification connected with Schnerzinger cables. According to the meters on the Precision M1 monoblocks ($94,750/pair), while the average level was 4–5W, the peaks on the drums reached 360W and more! Yet the sound remained clean and uncompressed. An impressive if expensive sound.
Brooklyn, NY-based Wes Bender Studio was demming the new leather-covered Hansen The Dragon Legend E speakers $60,000/pair), driven by EAR 509 monoblocks ($15,700/pair), an EAR 912 preamp ($13,000 with phono stage), and an EAR Disc Master turntable ($28,500) fitted with a Helius Silver Ruby tonearm ($5225) and Transfiguration Proteus ($6000) or SteinMusic Aventurin 6 Mk.2 ($6500) cartridges. Cabling was all Waveform Fidelity; racks were the impressively made Stillpoints.
This was the last room I went into at the show, so my hearing was pretty fatigued. Nevertheless, I thought a track…
TAD's chief engineer, Andrew Jones, always cheerful and happy, took great pleasure in introducing his newest design, the TAD CE1 Compact Evolution One, a contemporary styled bookshelf loudspeaker. This product produced my once-a-show epiphany for good sound. Of course, the success of a show presentation is a combination of s great equipment but also superb source material—Andrew Jones joked how his staff finds his musical taste most unusual.
Then he played a 1963 recording of Peter, Paul, and Mary that left me speechless. The voices were presented as 3-dimensional sonic holograms, with…
Jon Iverson already reported on MBL’s new Noble Line N31 DAC/CD player, and for me, one of the best sounds at the 2015 CES was listening to MBL’s system, based on this digital source feeding signal to the preamp section of the MBL N51 stereo integrated amplifier, with the amplifier section of the integrated and a N21 stereo amplifier (which have the same gain) to bi-amp the unique MBL 101E Mk.II omnidirectional speakers.
As I did at several other rooms, I used my Astell&Kern AK100 portable player to play some of my own stereo hi-rez recordings, this time plugging its TosLink output…
Princeton physics professor Edgar Choueiri is a suave handsome man. He is also a sophisticated art collector, and when he joins you for dinner, the IQ at the table rises dramatically. For his regular day job, he designs plasma rocket engines. Last, but not least, he is the mind and force behind Bacch-SP—a developing company engaged in leading edge virtual reality studies. Dr. Choueiri's audio research focuses on the experience of recorded sound as a fully three-dimensional experience. When Dr. Choueiri gets you in his listening room, in front of his speakers (or anywhere else around the room…