This was the last room I went into at the show, so my hearing was pretty fatigued. Nevertheless, I thought a track…
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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.
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…
Gilad Tiefenbrun, Managing Director of Linn Products (above), along with the Scottish company's Technical Director Keith Robertson, gave me a convincing demonstration of Linn's Exakt system. Like Edgar Choueiri's Bacch-SP, this powerful DSP-based system decouples the loudspeakers from the perceived sounds. It does so, not to create an immersive, binaural soundfield, but rather to eliminate problems with the behavior of the speakers' drive-units, correct errors in the speakers' performance as a whole, and optimize their relationship with a room’s acoustics. According to Linn, "Exakt pushes the…
As I was leaving the Venetian after closing up the Stereophile room on the last day of CES, I bumped into AudioQuest's Steve Silberman in the elevator. "I've got one left, take it," he said and handed me the little USB thingie in my photograph. "It's going to cost $49 and will be available in the spring."
I have been chained to my desk since then, working on this CES report, so I haven't had the time to do any serious listening. But I refer you to AudioStream's Michael Lavorgna here, where he writes "According to AudioQuest, Jitterbug is a dual-function USB line conditioner. . .the…
Is it an "implosive sound center" that offers, in Devialet's words, "The Best Sound in the World—1000 Times Superior to Current Systems," or is it an overblown puffer fish? Such thoughts crossed my mind as a young, computer-happy Devialeter, standing behind a curtain, fed techno music to the Phantom ($1990) and Silver Phantom ($2390), whose side panels in turn pumped in and out as it flooded a large suite in the Mirage with the driving beat of increasingly loud music that, if pumped through the water, might lead a poor puffer to puff its last.
Phantom reportedly takes advantage of "three…
"What kills me is that in my own showroom I have the same Wilson Alexia loudspeakers that Nagra is using, but they sound better in their set-up, and they aren't even using room treatment," lamented a retailer whose identity shall forever remain unspoken. What better compliment can one pay to Nagra's forthcoming HD amplifiers?
In April, Nagra introduces their Classic Line 120Wpc stereo amplifier (the smaller metal box in the photo), whose price maybe in the $14,500 range. A replacement for the current MSA model, which will be discontinued, it's a MOSFET design with as few output devices as…
In the first system to which I took a serious listen at CES, Alon Wolf could have made no more major a statement than by pairing his Magico Q7 loudspeakers ($185,000/pair) and new active QSub-18 ($36,000) with Soulution 701 monoblock amplifiers ($150,000/pair), Soulution 720 preamp (discontinued—the current 725 line stage is $50,000), Berkeley Audio Design Reference DAC ($16,000), Baetis Audio music server, Vovox cabling from Switzerland, Magico MRack ($50,000), and superb Magico QPOD equipment supports.
The QSub-18, which weighs 350 lbs, contains two 18" drivers, and employs either a…
What better way to end a day than to move from Magico/Soulution/Baetis/BAD/Vovox to a system in which dCS's digital statement, the ne plus ultra Vivaldi four-stack marvel (something like $108,496 plus all those cables to power and connect it), Dan D'Agostino Momentum monoblock amplifiers ($55,000/pair), Transparent MM2 cabling, and the new Rockport Cygnus loudspeakers ($62,500/pair). The sound was very different than Magico's on the next floor of the Mirage, and equally extraordinary.
Having usually heard dCS paired with Wilson Audio, it was a nice change of pace to discover it sounding…