When I entered the Nordost room, Roy Gregory and Lars Kristensen of Nordost were in the midst of preparing a demo of their Foundation Theory. Although the literature on the theory, which should be available on Nordost's website, consumes five small-print pages, the basic theory boils down to this: consistency in your brand of cabling, whatever the brand may be, produces greater rewards than mixing different lines of cabling.
I timed my arrival in Las Vegas for early afternoon on Wednesday, the day before the Consumer Electronics Show opened, so I'd have enough time to get from <I>Stereophile</I> staff's little of island of sanity in the smoke-free, gambling-free Hyatt Place Las Vegas to press registration at the mammoth Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The traffic was considerably lighter than during the show, the lines for registration much shorter than I would have encountered on opening day.
I got to the LVCC just in time. The journalist registration line in the second floor pressroom was virtually non-existent . . . until I finished. By then, 20 more journalists had lined up behind me.
<i>Push, push, one more, one more, push…Almost there! I can see its head!</i>
For the past several days, I’ve had Neil Young’s newly remastered solo debut playing on repeat. <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/musicroom/robertbaird/">Robert</a> received a copy of the <a href="http://www.neilyoungarchives.com/">Neil Young Archives</a> Official Release Series HDCD and I swiped it from him. (Actually, I was like, “May I please listen to that awesome stuff, please?”) Young’s first four albums, <i>Neil Young</i>, <i>Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere</i>, <i>After The Goldrush</i>, and <i>Harvest</i>, make up the first offering from the NYA ORS:
Boulder has updated their 1021 disc player, <a href="http://stereophile.com/cdplayers/boulder_1021_disc_player/">reviewed by John Atkinson</a> last July, adding an ethernet jack on the back and an iPhone app to control multiple streams of content such as a NAS drive on the network or media server. Boulder's Rich Maez says the new player is currently in the debugging stage and should be available near the end of January for $24,000.
I love wandering the halls and coming across a fully formed company that had up until now snuck under the radar in the US. Bladelius is such a brand, enjoying success all around the world and presently making a push into North America. President George Ioakimedes, who resides in the US, is at the show to sign up dealers and spread the word about the Swedish company.
Now that Meridian Sooloos has stabilized the hardware offerings in their front-to-back media server system, the new 2.1 software upgrades are getting most of the attention at this year's show.
CES also sees the announcement of the new control app. Though Sooloos currently has a browser-based controller for the iPhone and Touch, the new software is a true iTunes downloadable free app that adds piles of new features and, if the demo I saw is any indication, runs way faster.
Here's Ayre's Steve Silberman holding the new DX-5 universal player that can handle not only SACD, CD and DVD-Audio, but also DVD and Blu-ray discs. Think of it as an Oppo BDP-83 on super steroids. In fact the company starts with an Oppo drive and MPEG processor and throws everything else out, adding in a new power supply and all the important digital bits. Wrapped up in a beautifully machined package and retailing somewhere around $10,000, pre-orders begin next week, and deliveries should happen sometime in the first half of February.