Jason Victor Serinus

YG Acoustics' very fine-sounding midrange unit contributed to the lovely sound on YG Acoustics' Ascent loudspeaker ($19,800/pair). Easier to drive than the Colorado company's larger models, it uses the same drivers as in the Carmel and Hailey loudspeakers, but with a new waveguide on the tweeter.

You can always count on the amazing Steven Norber to come up with something intriguing. In this case, it was the brand new Dhyana two-way quasi line-array loudspeaker ($19,500/pair). With a 30mm tweeter and four 152.4mm woofers, the speaker claims a frequency range of 28Hz–23kHz, a nominal impedance of 8 ohms, and a sensitivity of 88.5dB.

This year, Sunil Merchant's Sunny's Components occupied a single room at T.H.E. Show in which to turn the spotlight on CH Precision's less expensive but hardly bargain basement 1 series. CH Precision's powerhouse line-up, shown below without the optional power supplies that can beef up performance, consisted of the CH Precision M1.1 stereo amplifier ($54,000), L1 stereo preamplifier ($34,500), P1 phono stage ($31,000 and up), C1.2 D/A processor ($36,000 and up) with 16× upsampling, and D1.5 SACD/CD/MQA transport/player ($41,000 and up).

One could only be impressed with the amount of air delivered by a cramped set-up in which TAD standmounts stood so close to each other and everything else. The sound was notably warm with excellent bass.