Jason Victor Serinus

Small does not mean negligible. Especially when a system includes the first West Coast showing of ATC's new CD2 CD player ($2349) and SIA2-100 integrated amp/DAC ($3749).

As one of the only companies to send out a press release prior to the opening of T.H.E. Show, ATC—along with its host, Lone Mountain Audio—earned pride of place in my "I can't possibly do them all" list of show coverage priorities.

It's Thursday afternoon at the Hilton Long Beach in Long Beach, California, and signs of T.H.E. Show, which opens on Friday, June 7, at noon, are everywhere in evidence.

With Trachea, the latest superb recording from Norwegian label 2L [http://www.2l.no], label founder and recording engineer Morten Lindberg continues his commitment to contemporary music. Here, working with Schola Cantorum, Norway’s well-tuned 55-year old chamber choir, under the leadership of Tone Bianca Sparre Dahl, Lindberg scores big with six fascinating and musically accessible choral compositions, all but one of which were written in the last five years.

British digital-audio specialists dCS (Data Conversion Systems) has been on a roll. Since the September 2015 introduction of the Rossini DAC ($23,999), the single-box Rossini Player ($28,499), and the Rossini Clock ($7499), they've released a number of new products and software/firmware updates. In 2016 came network firmware updates that established dCS DACs and Players as Roon endpoints. 2017 brought improved (v1.05) software for the Rossini DAC and Player, and 2018 an update to process MQA, followed by the October 2018 introduction of the Rossini upsampling SACD Transport ($23,500—see John Atkinson's review in the May 2019 Stereophile). Then, in January 2019, dCS released their Rossini v2.0 software, which applies to both the Rossini DAC and the Rossini Player, and which is offered free to Rossini owners.

When Dynaudio’s Mike Manousselis told me that the new Dynaudio Confidence 30 ($20,000/pair) has a new Esotar3 tweeter, I thought of John Atkinson, who praised this company’s tweeters in a review some years back. The new tweeter includes a Hexis inner dome to help dissipate back wave energy and, as with all the other new drivers in the speaker, uses new “ultra-powerful” neodymium magnets.

I was never able to take a photo of Octave’s full system, because so many people were walking up to the equipment rack and Focal Scala speakers to ogle Octave’s new Jubilee 300B amplifier (54,000 Euros). (That’s what happens when you display in one of the big glass-entranced spaces surrounding three sides of the first floor Atriums in the MOC.) You’ll have to settle for this photo, taken of a static display on the other side of the room divider from the active system.