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The penultimate night of CES is traditionally the night of the industry party thrown by Stereophile and Home Theater magazines—the 2007 CES saw the event taking place at Le Cirque club at the Paris Hotel. The good and great in high-end audio can be seen in the photograph and while we will not be giving points for identifying guests, we will kick the game off by pointing to Arcam founder John Dawson, in the white shirt ordering drinks from the bar at the top left. (A larger version of the photograph is posted in our website photo gallery.)
As regular magazine readers may know, I have not succumbed to the blandishments of surround-sound in my own listening room. But I still look at Shows for that convincingly magic experience. Listening to Ray Kimber's four-channel Isomike recordings in his 35th-floor room at the Venetian was indeed magic, though that was due in large part to his DSD-encoded masters capturing the appropriate spatial information. But across the hall, TAD was showing off a surround system comprising five of its Reference One speakers ($60,000/pair), driven by Pass Labs amps with a variety of commercial…
Big Trends:
Wireless Speakers—except that they replace the speaker wire with an AC cord, so you come out kind of even.
Music Servers—of course it's the sound that matters, but the interface is what will make the difference. Sooloos leads the way.
Apple iPhone—it's wireless and an iPod. This means your remote can now be your music library too. This will sink in soon, and audiophile WiFi will take off.
Wireless Speakers—except that they replace the speaker wire with an AC cord, so you come out kind of even.
Music Servers—of course it's the sound that matters, but the interface is what will make the difference. Sooloos leads the way.
Apple iPhone—it's wireless and an iPod. This means your remote can now be your music library too. This will sink in soon, and audiophile WiFi will take off.
Good Trends:
New Products—an amazing amount of activity in the Audio High End. Even traditional categories like speakers and amps are being advanced.
Value &…
For Martin Luther King day, here's John Coltrane's haunting "Alabama," which, according to Sascha Feinstein and Craig Werner, was based on the rhythms of the eulogy Martin Luther King delivered at the funeral for the four girls slain when their church was dynamited in Birmingham.
Written on the Sunday morning plane from LaGuardia to Las Vegas.
Outside Kelli's lower east side apartment, waiting for my car — car number 80 — in the cool, early morning.
It's cool, but I know it should be so much colder. It should be freezing. It's January 7th, and yesterday's temperature climbed above 70. People enjoy sudden outdoor seating at friendly neighborhood restaurants while squirrels wonder why they've been storing all these nuts. Something's wrong. I should be in bed.
About ten cabs try to pick me up. Groups of drunk young men and women come banging…
in-wall
custom installation
active speaker systems
multi-channel processors
a bit of a filter
only 5 rooms / no neighbors
no one's been able to not find us
custom installation
active speaker systems
multi-channel processors
Brent Hefley
a bit of a filter
only 5 rooms / no neighbors
no one's been able to not find us
everyone that you want to be here has been
Thiel CS3.7 $9900
Ayre MX-R monoblocks $16,500/pr
the appropriate toe-tap and head-bang inducing rhythm and pace
even got a suit to shake it
more revealing of the music's flaws than the Hegel system, chorus provoked someone behind me to lower the volume, but that's understandable; i was…
Way, way up on the Venetian Tower's 35th floor, I chatted for a bit with Ayre's Brent Hefley about the traffic at this year's show.
While, for members of the press, getting from one show location to the next has been an exercise in patience and planning — one that involves tracking down mysterious shuttle buses, squeezing onto crowded elevators, and long, long walks through smoking, blinking, buzzing casinos — for exhibitors, things have been good.
"We've got a great location," said Brent. "We're up here on the 35th floor, but no one's had a hard time finding us. Plus, there…