Jason Victor Serinus

In only its third year, T.H.E. Show Newport Beach has already become the largest consumer high-end/high-performance/fine-audio show in the United States. Running May 31–June 2 in the Hilton and Atrium Hotels, directly across the street from southern California's surprisingly low-key Orange County/John Wayne airport, the booked-to-the-max show promises 140 active exhibit rooms, an estimated 450 manufacturers from around the globe, and enough ancillary events to rival a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey three-ring circus.

Except that there are a lot more rings.

"Sensational" is an adjective far overplayed in "fine audio" circles (to borrow a phrase that Bob Levi of T.H.E. Show Newport Beach has been using). But I know of no better word to describe the jaw-dropping sound of a dCS/Boulder/Sony set-up at a May 4 demo in the Theater 2 room of Music Lovers Audio, San Francisco. With the assistance of a full complement of Transparent Audio cabling, save for an all-important active USB cable from Synergistic Research, the MacBook Pro/Audirvana-source system, featuring the Sony SS-AR1 speakers that so impressed Kal Rubinson in July 2011 was nothing short of sensational.

For me, the demo began when John R. Quick of Tempo Sales, distributor of digital equipment from UK-based dCS (Data Conversion Systems, Ltd.), ran up to me upon my arrival. Enthusiastically greeting me and my two remarkably well-behaved terrier mixes, Daisy Mae Doven and Leo Gleesun, he declared, "Jason, I have great news for you."

"I can hardly keep hold of the leashes, John," I said, quivering with anticipation. "Tell me, please, before I lose my grip."

"The new Synergistic Research USB Active SE cable blows every other USB cable I've tried out of the water. You've got to hear this thing."

Heads up! Not long after the sellout of both Decca Classics' First Collector's Edition box set of 50 Mercury Living Presence CD reissues, and their box set of six 180gm LP reissues, both drawn from the famed Mercury Living Presence catalog, Collector's Edition 2 arrives on May 14. The CD box's 55 titles include two first-CD issue rarities: Antal Dorati's 1953 Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra mono recording of Stravinsky's groundbreaking ballet, The Rite of Spring, and one of the final Mercury Living Presence recordings, John Corigliano's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. The Corigliano recording premiere, performed by pianist Hilde Somer and the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Victor Alessandro, is paired with a close to 17-minute interview with Corigliano, conducted by Paul Hume one year after the concerto's 1968 premiere, and the Paregon to Richard Strauss' Sinfonia Domestica, Op.73.

Cole Porter: An All-Star Tribute (DVD, VAI) includes outtakes of the great Ethel Merman filming for TV, in 1960, a performance of Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band." In take after take, something goes wrong. Each time the director shouts "Cut!," Merman stops in her tracks, almost as if deflating; when the director yells "Action!" she starts from the top, fresh as new, the model showbiz professional.

Visitors to Montreal's annual Salon Son et Image (SSI) high performance audio show will notice some changes when the three-day event opens to the public on Friday March 22 in its customary location, Hotel Hilton Bonaventure. For starters, instead of the approximately 100 exhibit rooms encountered in 2011, and the approximately 85 last year, visitors will discover 70, including two dedicated to home theater, as well as 370 brands.

When Steve Davis told me that people were hungry for an audio show in Chicago, he wasn’t kidding. What Davis believes to be over 4000 attendees—2000 tickets had been sold before the Show opened—visited over the course of three days, March 8–10. They mobbed many of the rooms on Saturday and actually managing to keep things lively in most of the rooms I visited on the 8th floor on Sunday. And that was with people having to choose among 90 exhibit rooms, a bunch of table displays, an art show, multiple seminars, and lively marketplace that together extended over five floors of the Doubletree in Rosemont (Ground, mezzanine, and all of floors 7, 8, and 9) near O’Hare Airport. (My thanks to John Atkinson for standing outside in the pouring rain to get the photograph of the hotel.)

I don’t know what the sound was like at Chicago’s last consumer audio show, sponsored by Stereophile, which took place in the Palmer House Hilton in the Loop in 1999, but at the Doubletree, a large number of dealers and manufacturers managed to produce good to excellent sound within the confines of hotel rooms that they had never before exhibited in.

You can always count on Doug White, owner of The Voice That Is in Newtown, PA, to provide excellent sound and an attractive display. At AXPONA, he came through in spades, rendering John Atkinson's recording of male ensemble Cantus singing Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque with extreme beauty. The system did equally well on Rimsky-Korsakov's well-worn Dance of the Tumblers, producing superb sound and nice depth. Lacking only were the ultimate transparency and room-filling soundstage that I encountered in far too few rooms at AXPONA.