Jon Iverson

Saturday morning Ayre held a press conference at the top of the Venetian to reveal their latest products, which include a new USB DAC, the QB-9.

Also revealed were two disc player upgrades from Ayre. Both the C-5xe universal player and the CX-7 CD player now have ^MP (Minimum Phase) appended to their names reflecting a new filtering option that the company says has no pre-echo and only one cycle of post-ringing. On the back of the players is a switch to select between the previous generation "apodizing" filter and the new MP filter.

Innovation comes from surprising places. Esoteric has always focused on pushing the state of the art with their flagship and pricey digital players (the financially squeemish can skip to another post now), but they've also begun to accommodate digital media wherever it may be found.

Esoteric has upgraded the wiring and parts inside the flagship P-01 and D-01 SACD/CD transport and DAC and has renamed them the P01-VU and D01-VU respectively. Each DAC is a single channel and retails for $16k and the transport will run you $32k. These are superbly built and incredible sounding digital products. Even if you can't afford them, just be glad they exist in our world.

One channel of DAC nirvana.

The touchscreen music server market has picked up a new face with the official release of Blue Smoke's "The Black Box". Demonstrated in prototype form at last year's CES, the final version is a sleek, um, black box with a single disc slot on the front and an array of connectors on the back. Retail is $6995 and should be hitting dealer shelves Q1 2009.

Here's a view of the by now familiar grid of albums on the Elo touchpanel connected to The Black Box.