Whatever you say about David Wilson, you have to admit he gives great show. Wilson doesn't come to CES with just a new product, he constructs a narrative structure and puts on a show. This is a good thing, since Wilson thinks long and hard about the lesson he wants to teach. He plays fair, too.
Musical Fidelity's US distributor Signal Path invited John Atkinson and me to hear the American debut of the kW DM25 Transport ($3000) and kW DM25 DAC ($3500). I didn't know the prices of the separates, so when I saw how luxe they looked I added an extra zero to the prices. But no, they really do cost just $6500 together.
This one's from the heart—take that you DRM-ing major labels!
Nothing says romance like a guinea pig costume.
I see it, but I can't make it work.
My definition of great writing is writing that makes you care about stuff you never even knew interested you. By that definition, this Warren St. John article explaining why he cares about college football qualifies. I think I'm going to buy <I>Rammer, Jammer, Yellow Hammer</I> for the flight home from Vegas.
You know that stuff I said about how pointless the pre-show press conferences are? Well, not always—not, for example, when Jim Thiel has been busy. At last year's CES, Thiel practically levitated when he began describing the challenges of re-designing his CS3.6 floorstander, which has been in production since 1992. He described what he'd keep in the CS3.7 (first-order crossover; three-way design; short-coil/long gap motor design; coincident tweeter and midrange, time coherence;and aluminum diaphragms) and then he began waxing rhapsodic about how completely open that left his imagination.
"Its first audible resonance is effectively above 20kHz—that's above the operating range of some <I>tweeters</I>."
I've always said that cables might be the most important component in a system—after all, without 'em, you don't get much sound out of the whole schmear. <A HREF=http://www.avegasystems.com">Avega Systems</A> is doing its best to make a liar out of me with its Oyster wireless loudspeaker.
If one component is omnipresent this year, it's the iPod. You may find this hard to believe, but there are actually companies making iPod accessories these days—actually, it's hard to find companies that aren't.