Stephen Mejias, Jason Victor Serinus

Simple, Elegant Design from Thinksound

I’m a big fan of Thinksound’s in-ear designs, but lately I’ve been listening more to on-ear and over-the-ear headphones&#151I find them more attractive, much more comfortable, and far easier to enjoy overall. So I was happy to learn that Thinksound is now working on its own on-ear design. The yet-to-be-named headphone will cost somewhere between $200 and $300, and should be available sometime this spring. Here we see an early prototype&#151Thinksound is still working to perfect the overall ergonomics.
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Luxury, Musicality, Enlightenment

Earlier in our show report, Jason Victor Serinus visited with Hans-Ole Vitus of Vitus Audio, as well as Vitus’s son, Alexander, whose own company, AVM-TEC, introduced its Alluxity line of amplification components. Here’s a photo of father and son together. I love the fact that the enthusiasm and wonder for high-performance audio runs through the family.

“We didn’t even have to force him into it!” Hans-Ole Vitus said of his son’s interest in audio.

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Pro-Ject's Box Series

Pro-Ject’s Media Box S ($359) is “basically a mini-computer,” Sumiko’s Norbert Schmied told me. It accepts a USB thumb drive (as shown), hard drive, or SD card containing MP3, WMA, AAC, or variable-bit-rate files up to 384kbps compression. It uses a 24-bit/96kHz upsampling D/A converter, and album metadata can be displayed and navigated via the front-panel display. Here we see it partnered with Pro-Ject’s Head Box S ($159) and the extremely lightweight and comfortable Hear It Two headphones ($79).

In his entry on Pro-Ject’s impressive DAC Box DS, Jon Iverson noted that the Sumiko suite showed an entire wall of the company’s cute but powerful Box components. Schmied gave me a detailed tour of the offerings. I’ve got three pages of notes on these nearly bite-sized components and every scribble is interesting, but here are the main points:

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Peachtree Audio’s desktop entertainment system

As usual, Peachtree Audio put together one of my favorite systems of the show: iPad, AppleTV, Peachtree Decco65 D/A integrated amplifier, and a pair of Peachtree Design 4 bookshelf loudspeakers mated with a small REL subwoofer.

I looked at the system; listened to the fun, engaging sound; and thought to myself: Why doesn’t everyone own a system like this?

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