It was late. I was exhausted. After a delicious dinner, I stopped at the Venetian with the intention of picking up my laptop, camera, and other heavy things before returning to my hotel room and passing out. When I reached the 29th floor, however, I ran into Richard Vandersteen and his family. They were also coming from a dinner, also looking exhausted.
I met Hegel's Bent Holter at HE 2007, and I was instantly attracted to his combination of tech-talk and passion for music. Bent is at once serious and strangely wacky.
Bent Holter loves his work. And the camera.
The Atohm Grand Thrill Series made its world premiere at CES 2008. Designer Thierry Comte is pictured here with the very handsome GT 1 bookshelf speaker which exhibited an almost uncanny ability to fill the room with deep, powerful bass. Highs were also impressive: crisp, clean, and fast. Overall, I felt the presentation was tightly focused and lively, without being overly sharp.
Both the GT 1 bookshelf and GT 2 floorstander loudspeakers offer a handy tweeter control for "precise adjustment of the frequency response in relation to the listening room and associated equipment," said Thierry Comte.
The totally new-to-me Indiana Line, imported by VMAX Services, was a great surprise. VMAX Service's Richard Kohlruss tells me the company's been around for 30 years. Their Arbour Series of loudspeakers are finished in an attractive real-wood cherry veneer with nicely rounded front panel edges. At just about 37" high and only 25lbs, the 5.02 is not only easy on the eyes, it's also practical for small listening rooms like mine.
You wouldn't tell by looking at him, but Martin Tremblay is camera-shy. He's modest, though he has every reason to be proud. Triangle's new Genese Series continues the French firm's tradition of sophisticated styling. With its slender, elegant cabinet and smooth, glossy finish, the $4900/pair Quartet descends from Triangle's Magellan Series and is just as lovely.
After days filled with wildly-shaped loudspeakers constructed from all sorts of fantastic materials, I must say it was refreshing to see a familiar face—the DeVore Fidelity Gibbon 3, a speaker that looks like a speaker.
PBN's Peter Noerback had emailed me back in December about his new Montana KAS2 tower. The 300lb, 6'-tall speaker has twin 12" woofers top and bottom powered by a 1kW amplifier, with what appear to be top-of-the line 9" lower and 5" upper midrange units from SEAS flanking a 1.125" tweeter. An active, line-level bass extender, the Olympia EX, pushes the low-frequency extension below the resonance point of the woofers. Sensitivity is specified as a very high 93dB/W/m. The sealed cabinet features a solid-maple front baffle and is an asymmetrical hexagon in shape to minimize internal resonances. Price, considering the enormous size of the speaker, is a relatively realistic $38,000/pair, which includes the bass extender.
"Wes Phillips said you would be coming by to take pictures of our loudspeaker," said Paul DiComo, Vice President of Marketing at Definitive Technology. Paul then took me over to a pair of the company's slim Mythos ST Super Tower loudspeakers driven by Pass Labs XA 100.5 100W solid-state monoblocks. Standing just over 48" tall, the speakers had a width of 6.75" and a depth of only 9.5" What a change from the massive transducers I had seen at other venues at CES 2008!