Like all Wilson Audio Specialties' speakers, the Series 8 redesign of the venerable WATT/Puppy combination is available in flawless, clear-coat automotive finishes. I do wonder, however, how many of the Utah company's customers choose more conservative finishes than those on display at CEDIA. Arrival of a pair of WATT/Puppy 8s in reviewer Wes Phillips' listening room is imminent. What color will they be?

I couldn't resist posting one more photo of Bruce Thigpen's fan-driven infrasonic subwoofer, this time showing the drive-unit in operation. Loaded with an infinite baffle—it is in the next room—it fires into a foam-lined sub-chamber, which low-pass filters the residual fan noise, leaving just the awesome infrasonics to pressurize the room next door. Because the fan is providing the main motive power, just 30W of audio signal was required to create an spl of 115dB at 8Hz!

Quietly tucked at the back of the main hall, Musical Fidelity had a lot of new stuff of great audiophile interest. First off is the new "audio Swiss Army Knife," as JA referred to it in his blog yesterday, the all-in-one, $9000 kW250. But among the other goodies on the Signal Path booth was the X-Package, consisting of the neat little X-RAYv8 24/192 upsampling CD player, the X-T100 60Wpc tube hybrid integrated amp, and the Triple-X power supply which powers both as well as an optional external DAC, tuner, etc. In their compact but non-resonant aluminum casings, this $3000 system was surprisingly potent.

While on-wall/in-wall systems were ubiquitous at CEDIA, the in-room speakers stood out for their imaging and sound quality. Even the tiny Dynaudio 2.1 system consisting of a pair of Contour SR speakers ($2200/pair) coupled with the Sub 250 ($1k) made sounds that many bigger installations would envy. Add another pair and a Contour SC ($1900) to fill out a 5.1 system that can do music as well as movies.

Wendell Diller demos the "just been completed" Magnepan Automated Speaker. Essentially a Maggie MGMC1 ($725) in a wooden frame with a remote-controlled magnetic latch. When you're not using the speakers, they fold flat against the wall, looking like minimalist wall art. When you fire up the hi-fi or HT, click the button and the Automated Speakers spring into position, angling off the walls for best imaging. Price not yet determined.

There are always oases of two-channel audio on the main floor at a CEDIA conference. Boulder Amplifiers were showing their beautiful-looking and equally beautiful-sounding range of solid-state electronics, including their cost-no-object 2000 series components and the more affordable 1000 and 800 series gear. The latter includes the $5k Model 850 200W monoblock (center), seen here framed by company founder Jeff Nelson (left) and marketing exec Rich Maez (right).

The metalwork is all done in-house—Jeff comes from a family of craftsman machinists and has invested heavily in CNC equipment.

Conrad-Johnson's Lew Johnson demos CJ's $7500 MET1 multichannel enhanced triode preamplifier. The twist? It's an analog six-channel preamplifier! It sounded exquisite, whether on two-channel sources or multichannel—only the MET1 can synthesize multichannel from the higher resolution two-channel PCM tracks present on many multichannel DVDs.

Speaking of resolution, Johnson touted The Resolution Project disc that takes two tracks (a jazz trio and a Haydn quartet) and presents them in MP3, WMA, AAC, 16./44.1kHz, 24/96kHz, 24/192kHz, 16/44.1 surround, and 24/96kHz surround. Lew started with the higher resolution tracks and ran down to MP3—and it really showed what you throw away when you dump data. What a great learning tool—one every dealer should have on hand.

Archimedes famously said, "Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world." Quartet Marketing's Stirling Trayle and Composite Products LLC's Gus Malek-Madani take that "place to stand" part seriously. Malek-Madani makes stands from carbon fiber and he's adamanant that metal and glass "are the worst materials for isolation and vibration energy dissipation." His solution? Carbon fiber.

Malek-Madani teamed with Quartet to produce the CF 2000 ($500–$600), which can either replace existing shelves in racks, or be used as stand-alone on-shelf support.

No job, as they say, too small.

A speaker brand new to me at THE Show was YG Acoustics. Seen here with his four-way Anat Reference Studio ($60k/pair with a single subwoofer per side) is YG's Yoav Gonczarowksi, who says that he doesn't "voice" his speaker—the perfect speaker shouldn't have a voice but should just reproduce what's on the recording.

Though they are based in Colorado, YG's speakers are so far only sold in Japan, where they have garnered a number of magazine awards. They are in the process of establing a US dealer network.

CEDIA is an installer's show at its core, so lots of exhibits have nothing to do with audio or video—many are about tools that make the installer's life easier. Some of them are small ideas, such as belt packs to carry cable ties in. Others,like the Little Giant folding ladder are big—and let me tell you, the Little Giants booth was hopping. Why not? It folds up small, and can be used as a straight ladder, step ladder, offset ladder, or staircase ladder.

Heck, I'm not even an installer and I wanted one.

Canton's chief speaker designer Frank Göbl stands beside Canton's $30,000/pair Vento Reference One DC, a 3.5-way floorstander that's probably going to keep some high-priced speaker builders awake at night.

Look for a Stereophile review in the October issue.

And, no, Frank isn't that short—the speaker is on a pedestal.

Eminent Technology’s Bruce Thigpen has always taken an interesting slant on how to design audio products—his air-bearing tonearm was one of the best-sounding back in the day and his push-pull planar magnetic speakers are thought by some to be unbeatable. But at THE Show, held next door to the official CEDIA venue, the Convention Center, in the Denver Athletic Club, Bruce was showing off his infrasonic subwoofer. Yes, that’s a fan, which rotates at a constant 800rpm. The wrinkle is that the audio signal is used to vary the pitch of the fan blades. Feathered with no signal, when driven with audio the twisting blades produce a massive acoustic wave with very little power input. The bandwidth is limited by the fan speed to below 30Hz or so—you have to rotate it faster to reproduce higher frequencies but then its self noise increases rapidly— but it will reproduce frequencies as low as 1Hz with a very high spl.

Its effective radiating area increases as the frequency goes down, which is just what you need with a subwoofer. Downside is that it needs to be installed in a separate room, with the wall between acting as an infinite baffle. But then, it really did produce awesome levels of low-distortion infrasonics, literally shaking the walls and the room‘s ceiling!

Jim Shannon and Stirling Trayle of Quartet Marketing pose with the $4200 T+A K1 AV,which combines CD/DVD playback with analog matrix room sound processing, analog preamp duties, an FM tuner, and two channels of 100W power plus one channel of 60W.

What's the point? "We suspect many people aren't all that interested in those rear channels—especially if they don't watch effects-laden movies," said Trayle. "The K1 will appeal to the consumer whose main focus is music, but who wants the movie experience to be as good as his audio. Besides, if rear and side channels are necessary, we do offer S/PDIF outputs."

And yes, that is North By Northwest playing on the TV—an excellent example of a film that doesn't need rear channels.

I missed a call when I was showering this morning. It was producer Elliot Mazer (right) asking me to visit him at the Music Giants booth, where he and Halcro’s Philip O’Hanlon (left) had something they wanted to me to see (and hear). Music Giants specializes in hi-rez music downloads and Elliot, it turns out, has been spending a lot of time working on transcoding SACD masters to 24/96 or 24/88.2 LPCM for record companies who are starting to realize that they might not ever get back their investment in the new formats from sales of physical discs.

At CEDIA, the two had a system based on Windows Media Player running on an inexpensive PC feeding a Wadia DAC, which in turn fed a headphone amp driving Shure’s new E500PTH in-ear headphones. The hi-rez files were encoded as WMA lossless files and sounded very sweet. Even with variable bit rate lossless encoding, the bit rate for Miles Davis’s "Blue In Green" was, according to the WMA display, a thumping 2609 kbps.

With current music servers providing CD quality music around the home, Music Giants feels that it’s time to take the hi-rez step, and has signed contracts with a number of high-profile custom-install companies.

One reason the NAD M5—indeed, all of the Master Series components—sound so good, Mark Stone says, is the gigando special NAD class-A gain modules, which "offer tremendous dynamic headroom and nearly immeasurable distortion." JA is working on a review of the M3 integrated amplifier, which also uses these modules.

Lenbrook Technologies' Mark Stone pops with pride over NAD's Master Series $1799 M5 SACD/CD Player, which employs separate signal paths for CD and SACD. The player's CD resolution is 24-bit, 192kHz. Since it's aimed at audio systems rather than HT applications, the M5 includes comprehensive bass management for multichannel SACDs and front-panel–accessible preset 5.1 speaker configurations.

The amiable team of industry veterans David Solomon (left) and Jim Spainhour (right) make up Signal Path, who distributes Musical Fidelity products in the US. They are seen here with MF’s new “audio Swiss Army knife,” the kW250, which includes a CD player, an FM tuner, a preamp with an MM phono stage, and a 250Wpc power amplifier for its $9000 price. A digital input on the back takes the feed from your music server and yes, there is a jack for your iPod on the front. "An ‘exit-level’ component," is how Jim describes it, "for the middle-aged music lover who wants system simplicity without sacrificing sound quality."

Also $9000 is Musical Fidelity’s new kW550 integrated, which takes a 600Wpc version of the kW750 power amp that Mikey Fremer reviewed in December 2005—quite the sweetest-sounding amp Musical Fidelity has ever made, I feel—and combines it with a version of the kWP Hybrid preamp in one chassis. Now that’s a product I want to hear.

It was only a couple of CEDIAs ago that Paradigm introduced its Signature series of high-performance speakers, and I was very impressed by the stand-mounted Signature S2 when I reviewed it for Stereophile in July 2005 (see http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/705paradigm/). But the Canadian company’s big news of the Show was that they have redesigned, not just the Signature series but their entire line! The new models use beryllium-dome tweeters and midrange units with aluminum cones treated with cobalt to add stiffness. The looks of the Signature series are still to die for, however.

When it has something to announce, an animated icon (Basil of the mirror) appears and announces, "Will someone greet our guests at the door?" or any other pertinent update. (The talking pirate skull says, "Some scurvy dog be sneak'n up to the door.")

Cute, huh? Not so cute: It costs $22,000.