Big Trends:
Wireless Speakers—except that they replace the speaker wire with an AC cord, so you come out kind of even.
Music Servers—of course it's the sound that matters, but the interface is what will make the difference. Sooloos leads the way.
Apple iPhone—it's wireless and an iPod. This means your remote can now be your music library too. This will sink in soon, and audiophile WiFi will take off.

Good Trends:
New Products—an amazing amount of activity in the Audio High End. Even traditional categories like speakers and amps are being advanced.
Value & Statement Products—exhibitors were pushing both the upper and lower price ranges of performance.
Great Sound—hotel suites are tough, but there was reference sound in dozens of rooms. We're getting better at treatments, although the bigger downstairs ballrooms were a bit too much for some.

Worrisome Trend:
Audiophile bling in the form of "Tubes Rule" teeth grilles worn by at least two exhibitors.

Bad Trend:
The CEA locating the Venetian press room and shuttles a half mile away from the Venetian tower rooms. They must hate high-end audio (or be in the pay of Rockport Walkers and Doc Martens).

As regular magazine readers may know, I have not succumbed to the blandishments of surround-sound in my own listening room. But I still look at Shows for that convincingly magic experience. Listening to Ray Kimber's four-channel Isomike recordings in his 35th-floor room at the Venetian was indeed magic, though that was due in large part to his DSD-encoded masters capturing the appropriate spatial information. But across the hall, TAD was showing off a surround system comprising five of its Reference One speakers ($60,000/pair), driven by Pass Labs amps with a variety of commercial recordings, from two-channel to multichannel on SACD.

TAD/Pioneer speaker designer Andrew Jones (above) had told me while I was measuring the Pioneer S-1EX speaker just after Thanksgiving for our March issue's feature review that he was planning to demonstrate hi-rez multichannel sound, without video, on Blu-ray disc at CES. Unfortunately, mastering problems prevented that from being possible, but the sound from multichannel SACD, was still superb, if not quite as convincing as Ray Kimber's recordings.

It wasn't being played when I was in the TAD room, but the open-reel recorder you can see in Jon Iverson's photo is an old Technics RS 1800. According to Ultimate AV editor Tom Norton in his CES Report, a company called The Tape Project plans to issue prerecorded analog tapes in 15ips, half-track, two-channel format. They will also sell refurbished Technics decks (estimated price about $8500).

The penultimate night of CES is traditionally the night of the industry party thrown by Stereophile and Home Theater magazines—the 2007 CES saw the event taking place at Le Cirque club at the Paris Hotel. The good and great in high-end audio can be seen in the photograph and while we will not be giving points for identifying guests, we will kick the game off by pointing to Arcam founder John Dawson, in the white shirt ordering drinks from the bar at the top left. (A larger version of the photograph is posted in our website photo gallery.)

The unquestionable sonic high point of my second day at CES was the opportunity to hear two of the larger, floorstanding speakers in the line that has already brought us the much-touted $20,000/pair Magico Mini "bookshelf." The largest and most expensive of the pair is the $120,000/pair M6 (Model 6). First released one year ago, this four-way floorstander includes three 10" woofers, one 7" mid-bass driver, one 5" midrange unit, and an air motion-transformer tweeter. Weighing 650 lbs, with an enclosure of extruded aluminum, the speaker is said to extend from 28Hz to 50kHz, with a 90dB sensitivity and a 4 ohm impedance. The M6 recently won the Grand Prix Award from Japanese magazine Stereo Sound, and was featured on the cover of its December 2006 issue.

The smaller model, the $22,000/pair, three-way V-3, made its US debut at CES 2007 after being introduced in Japan and Hong Kong six months ago. One of the speaker's many distinguishing characteristics is that its drivers are coupled not to MDF, but to aluminum, thus eliminating loss of detial caused when bolts driven into MDF inevitably begin to loosen. As with the M6, all drivers are manufactured in-house. These 150 lb babies (pictured in John Atkinson's photo with Magico's Alon Wolf) include two 7" woofers, one 6" midrange unit, and the same premium ring-radiator tweeter as the Mini. The drive-unit cones, however, are formed from a foam/composite material used to make helicopter rotor blades, and are said to be 300% stiffer than the Mini's woofer cone. The speaker's frequency response is said to extend from 36Hz to 50kHz, with an 88dB claimed sensitivity and a 6 ohm impedance.

The larger system included the $70,000, 165 lb BAlabo BP-1 Mk.II power amplifier, making its first appearance at a US show, the $55,000 BAlabo BC-1 Mk.II control amplifier, an Esoteric X-01 SACD player, MIT Oracle V1.1 MA speaker cables (starting at $24,900), and MIT Oracle V.1.1 MA single-ended interconnects (starting at a mere $6,995/1m pair). Not a system to be taken lightly, that's for sure. The V-3s were paired with a small Spectral CD player and amp, VAC preamp, and the MIT cabling said to work best with Spectral electronics.

The sound? In my first minute of listening, I began to ask myself what was so special about the sound. Then I recalled that the M6's were the first speakers I had heard which sounded absolutely right in the compromising confines of a Venetian hotel suite. Listening deeper into the music, I discovered that, in addition to sounding very open and alive, with beautifully full midranges, both systems excelled in timbral accuracy. Very few speakers—or systems, for that matter—get the highs right. Cymbals, for example, tend to sound either brittle, overly glassy, or too polite. Rarely will you hear a horn blare the way that brass blasts out at you in a live acoustic space. Either it peels your skin away or it lightly ruffles your feathers. Harpsichords are another instrument that tend to sound either too tinkly, too damped, or too thin and diminutive in resonance.

Both pairs of Magicos were not the least bit afraid of their highs. Cymbals sounded as close to real cymbals as I have ever heard them from a sound system. In addition, every teeny little nuance or sound in the studio could be heard, not in analytical or clinical fashion, but with unforced, "you are there" veracity. (A case in point were the first and third tracks on jazz vocalist Susanne Abbuehl's Compass, which yielded a degree of detail never once heard from my own speakers).

These are both wonderful speakers, an opinion he tells me, that John Atkinson shares, having auditioned his There Lies the Home CD on both. If the Mini, which I have yet to hear in optimal conditions, approaches its bigger cousins in accuracy and musicality, I can begin to understand what all the fuss is about.

Canadian speaker company PSB has majored in high-performance affordable speakers, with its tiny Alpha, introduced in 1992, becoming on of the best-selling speakers of all time. Designer Paul Barton (above), however, has been working on a flagship PSB speaker, which he demmed at the Lenbrook suite at the Hard Rock Hotel. Yet to be named, the new speaker will cost a still-affordable $4500/pair and spearheads a new line of six models to be introduced in the second quarter this year.

No fasteners of any kind are visible on the gracefully curved enclosure: black-anodized aluminum extrusions form the front and back, and top and bottom surfaces of the MDF cabinet, with the drivers mounted to a sub-baffle beneath the aluminum. Tweeter is a titanium-dome type mounted beneath the midrange unit, while each of the three 6" woofers is loaded with its own ported sub-enclosure. The result, says Paul, is a speaker that goes louder and deeper more cleanly than his Stratus Gold of a decade ago. The lower-frequency drivers use cones made from felted natural fibers laminated with fiber-glass to give the requisite combination of lightness, stiffness, and self-damping. Copper shorting rings on the voice-coils and an aluminum ring on the rear of the magnets help reduce midband THD to <0.1% at 96dB spl!

The placement of the woofers on the front baffle and the crossover filter slopes for each, as well as the midrange unit, was calculated so that the speaker is virtually immune to the usual response "floor-dip," due to destructive interference between the drive-units' direct sound and the reflection of that sound from the floor. It is relatively easy to arrange for the floor dip from the midrange unit to occur below its passband and that from the lowest woofer to occur above its passband, but optimizing the behavior of the other two woofers must have been tricky, to say the least.

The top of the Italian speaker manufacturer's line is the Stradivari homage, which Michael Fremer reviewed for Stereophile in January 2005 and which was one of that year's "Products of the Year." At $40,000/pair, that impressive speaker will be out of reach of many audiophiles' pockets, however, so the Elipsa attempts to offer much of the Strad's performance at a relatively more affordable price ($20,000/pair). The top of Sonus Faber's Cremona line, which dispenses with the homage series' piano-lacquer finish in favor of a still-elegant polished veneer, the three-way Elipsa is smaller than the Strad and has one fewer woofers, but shares its unique elliptically curved cabinet profile.

I reviewed the original Cremona in March 2004, and from what I heard at CES, the Elipsa builds on the older speaker's strengths, particularly regarding the solidity of its soundstaging and the natural quality of its midrange. A must for review, I feel.

You'd think there was not much more to say when it came to horn speaker design. Yet there, in one of the Venetian's 29th-floor rooms was audible proof that progress can still be made. Designed by Japanese engineer Tetsuo Kubo (above), the Kubotek Haniwa SP1W33 horn speakers ($60,000/pair) use Electrovoice drivers loaded with midrange and low-frequency horns that continue the Tractrix flare around to the rear of the horn to minimize edge reflections. A separate DSP processor, the FPIC-100 Sound Signal Controller is used to correct the horns' phase characteristics independent of the amplitude response.

The sound of Mobile Fidelity's new reissue of Coleman Hawkins' The Hawk Flies High was surprisingly natural-sounding (other than its ping-pong early-stereo nature), which Kubo-san claims is due to the speaker's drivers being accurately time-aligned. My face must have betrayed my skepticism as Kubo-san pulled out a microphone and a Praxis PC-based measurement system and showed me that yes, the Haniwa's in-room impulse and step responses were indeed time-coincident. Impressive.

Having waxed ecstatic over the big Märten full-range loudspeaker on display at last October's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I was delighted to discover the somewhat smaller $30,000/pair The Bird on display in two virtually square, air-walled conference rooms at the Sands/Venetian Convention Center. The three-way speaker, with a 6 ohm impedance, boasts a frequency range of 28Hz–45kHz, and is 89dB sensitive at 2.83V.

Heard without benefit of room treatment, first with a complement of EAR electronics ($6895 865 preamp, $7295 890 Acute power amp, and $5495 CD player in aluminum finish), then with all-Swedish electronics from several different companies (Bladelius $13,995 Gondul Mk.II M multi-format player and Bladelius $15,000 Ymer stereo amplifier, Jorma Design cables, and Solid Tech rack), the Märten speaker's custom-made, 26mm, diamond tweeter and ceramic drivers contributed to a wonderful, vibrant presentation of great width and depth. Lows were muddled, but that was the case with many speakers encountered in the Sands' near-impossible-to-control conference room acoustics. I look forward to further opportunities to hear the speaker, which is distributed in the US by EAR's Dan Meinwald.

Needing a shot of the real thing after a particularly disappointing dem from another manufacturer, I headed down the hall to hear Aurum Acoustics' total package. ($48,000 gets you the Integris CDP CD player, Integris Active 300B amplifier and speakers, Integris two-shelf Isolation Rack in matching veneers, 2m power cable, Aluminum Base kit, and Loudspeaker Grille Kit. As I said, the whole package.

After stumbling upon founder/designer Derrick Moss's company at its 2006 CES debut at the Alexis Park, I was so impressed that I requested a review sample of the Integris CD player ($12,000), which I favorably reviewed for another publication. With the company now ensconced on the 30th floor of the Venetian Tower, I seized the opportunity to revisit their whole system.

And what a system it is. The amp/speaker combo, which sends 5W to the tweeters and midrange drivers, and 100W to the woofers, is capable of thundering low bass and strong, non-piercing highs. Playing the final track of Reference Recordings' astounding new disc of The Music of David Maslanka, I heard strong percussive thwacks and the kind of low organ notes that would make any speaker manufacturer proud. As impressive as the low- and high-frequency extension were the stunning depth of soundstage, undoubtedly enhanced by Derrick's choice to face listeners toward the upper half of the two-tiered room. I'm not sure I like Maslanka's music, but the climax to his 30-minute Symphony 4, played by everyone and their mother in the Dallas Wind Symphony, is one of those unending tour de forces that will easily bring most of the audio systems on the planet to their metaphoric knees.

Next shifting to a recent CD transfer of a 1973 analog recording of soprano Elly Ameling and pianist Dalton Baldwin performing Schubert's late lied "Die Sterne" (The Star), then to Florilegium's new Channel Classics SACD, Bolivian Baroque II, I heard a most convincing representation of early instruments. As brilliant as that from the $22,000/pair Magico loudspeakers I write about in another entry? No. The top was softened just a bit, enough to make the system acceptable in bright rooms such as the Venetian's, which in this case came with glass surfaces behind listeners and on either side. But then again, absolutely no other loudspeaker at the show possessed the Magico's degree of treble openness and veracity. And the Magico, which costs almost half as much as Aurum Acoustics' entire system, could not reproduce the bass of Maslanka's climaxes with anything approaching AA's authority and control.

I also heard a bit of characteristic SET midrange gray in a rather narrow band of the system's strong midrange. To many listeners, this will be exactly what they enjoy about SET amplification. It certainly did not detract from the system’s abundant musicality.

While Moss has already established a dealership network in Canada, and already received two reviews plus Soundstage.com's 2006 "Edge of the Art Award" in his first year of operation, Aurum Acoustics has yet to establish a dealer network for more than the CD player in the United States. But unless everyone has cotton in their ears, I feel it safe to bet that several US dealerships will pick up the entire system within a few months.

Mark Levinson showed a design study for its Reference No.53 monoblock amplifier in its Hilton suite, which will replaced the previous flagship, the No.33. Although details are not finalized, Levinson's Walter Schofield suggested that each monoblock chassis will be rated in the neighborhood of 500W into 8 ohms, and will be priced at approximately $20,000.

The No.53 employs an elegant new heatsink design, with curved, smaller fins. As a result, the No.53 is lighter—135 lbs—than the 230 lb '33H monoblock. Those of us who have to lift such heavy metal are celebrating the fact that Levinson has included integral handles under the '53's front and rear top plates.

I included the elegant space-frame grille in the photo because Revel's Kevin Voecks said that it had no degrading effect on the Salon's sound quality, which is just as well, given the rather intimidating appearance of all those metal cones. Both the Salon 2 and the smaller Studio 2 are scheduled to start shipping in April.

I fell in love with the sound of the unique omnidirectional mbl tweeter when I reviewed mbl 111 loudspeaker in August 2002, so I always treat my ears by visiting the Berlin company's room the last morning of a Show. At the 2007 CES, they were showing this: an assault on the state of the speaker art based on two the mbl 101E's upper-frequency modules mounted on top of one another, with separate active woofer towers. The excess of glass in the hotel suite led to a rather uptilted high-treble balanced, but the presentation was as awesome aurally as it was visually.

BAT introduced the two-chassis, $18,500 REX preamplifier at CES. The 18-tube preamplifier incorporates vacuum-tube rectifiers, C-multipliers, oil capacitors, and shunt regulators to filter the power supply's DC voltages. The control module incorporates a 140-step volume control that uses a 16-bit digital control with Vishay bulk-metal–foil resistors as pass-through devices. Each input to the preamplifier can be adjusted individually.

BAT set up an all-tube system (above) to demonstrate the REX preamplifier, including a VK-D5SE CD player and VK-150SE monoblock amplifiers, driving the highly regarded two-way Magico Minis on their matching stands. Source was a Basis turntable and cabling was by Kubala-Sosna. BAT's Stephen Bednarski played two outstanding demo selections, Shinedown's "Simple Man" and Sting's "It's Probably Me" (from his My Funny Valentine at the Movies album). The sonics were totally involving, moving me to want to hear more from this new preamplifier.

I looked into the Cary Audio Design room in the Venetian Towers to catch up with designer Dennis Had to find out what the North Carolina company had been up to since I visited them a year ago. But he was out, so I settled back to enjoy some fine music on Dynaudio Confidence C4 speakers—favorites of mine since I reviewed them in September 2003—driven by the 10th-Anniversary Edition of Cary's CAD805 single-ended triode monoblock, perhaps the finest-sounding of its breed. Source was the CAD-306 SACD player, back in production after some manufacturing problems with its Sony-sourced chipset. Nice. Very nice.

While John Atkinson awaits a review sample of Parasound's just-released JC 2 two-channel analog preamp ($4000), photographed here (second from top) with Parasound president Richard Schram by Kalman Rubinson, I took the opportunity to discuss its genesis with Richard.

Believing that the best preamp ever manufactured was John Curl's no longer available $20,000 Blowtorch, which first came out in 1997, Richard set out to create the world's second-best preamp. In part, he did so simply because he believed he could. Taking as his starting point the Blowtorch's circuit topology, Richard determined to create a new preamp that would incorporate a new level of visual aesthetics and 21st-Century lifestyle demands (eg, remote control).

First he engaged the entire CTC design team: audiophile genius John Curl; circuit board designer John Thompson; and parts specialist Bob Crump. Crump has since died of a stroke, but not before he managed to apply his expertise to choosing parts based on an intimate knowledge of their sound. Richard also considers John Curl one of the few engineers who understands the relationship between how electrons move through parts and the sound of the music they create. "I can show you six areas in the JC 2 where I can change parts that will change the sound but not change the measurements," Richard told me. Sound, rather than measurements, was thus considered as the ultimate test of the design’s success.

"The topology is almost identical to the Blowtorch's," he told me, "but there is an extra degree of refinement." On the driver board, for example, Parasound has spaced parts even more closely together than before to reduce vibration. John Thompson’s circuit board also mimics the topology of the actual circuit, and looks very much like a schematic of the unit.

One of the reasons for the Blowtorch's high price was that its chassis, machined out of a solid aluminum ingot, cost $2000 to make. Richard instead chose mass production on the smallest-possible scale, lowering the unit price by means of a big upfront investment, and using, whenever possible, the same kinds of parts used throughout Parasound's highly regarded JC line of electronics.

Whenever I have caught up with Ken Kessler (left) at audio shows in the past two years, he has uncharacteristically grumbled about all the work he was doing writing and compiling McIntosh...For the Love of Music. "Every time I interview someone connected with the iconic Binghampton audio company, they tell me about two more people I didn't know existed whom I should interview."

The result of Ken's labors made its debut at the 2007 CES. A lavishly produced coffee-table book, the size and thickness of his previous work on Quad, Ken's McIntosh book is a must-have for anyone interested in or fascinated by the evolution of high-end audio in the US. Along with Ken and McIntosh president Charlie Randall, the book-signing reception on January 9 was graced by the presence of legendary McIntosh engineer Sidney Corderman (right), lured out of retirement for the occasion. John Marks will be reviewing the McIntosh book, which is available from McIntosh dealers, in a late-spring issue of Stereophile.

Damping the celebratory mood at the reception was the news that David H. O'Brien, who had tested amplifiers all over the United States and Canada for nearly 30 years at the renowned McIntosh Amplifier Clinics, had passed away that same day at the age of 79. Dave had been a major source for the book.

I got an email from Stereophile columnist John Marks Wednesday night, urging me to visit the room at the Venetian featuring speakers from retailer On Track Audio. I always do what I am told by my writers, so I looked in Thursday afternoon. There I auditioned the Directorate loudspeaker system, designed by mastering engineer Bill Roberts. All four cabinets are sealed boxes and are finished in exquisitely in-laid veneers, the work of On Track's Jim Carnes, who looks understandably pleased with his work in my photo. The sound with Belles amplification, and Kimber Kable, was very promising, I thought.

I couldn't resist posting this photo, not of a product, but of photos of a product, just to get Mikey Fremer all riled up about the fact that the Continuum Caliburn turntable, for which he forked out mucho dinero, is no longer the Big Dog of LP playback.

The Goldmund Reference II celebrates 25 years since the introduction of the original Reference. Just five will be made each year, according to Goldmund's Michel Reverchon when I spoke with him at the company's Bellagio suite, and 2007's production has already been spoken for. And yes, it will cost $300,000.

The Reference II, which, like its illustrious ancestor, includes a high-mass plinth, will accommodate three conventional tonearms. However, Goldmund is working on an optical pickup/arm, which will incorporate a high-performance A/D converter at the headshell. This will not be available for some time, probably not until 2008.

The Canadian Gershman Black Swan speaker ($30,000/pair), which mounts the tweeter and midrange unit in a separate A-frame enclosure to prevent their performance being affected by vibrations from the woofer, made its debut at HE2006 last May, and I was looking forward to hearing what it could do at CES.

Driven by Red Rock Audio's Renaissance 50W push-pull triode monoblocks ($39,750/pair), they sounded sweet indeed. The zero-loop feedback amplifiers must, of course, have had something to do with that. Red Rock's Alan Stiefel (who moonlights as the organizer of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest) showed me the amp's measurements, and though the lack of loop negative feedback means that the THD doesn't drop below an okay 0.1% at 1W, the amplifier maintains that performance over an extraordinarily wide bandwidth. The output tubes are direct-heated Svetlana 572-10s, a new tube to me, but which threw off an inviting glow as well as great sound.

Stephen Mejias mention Garth Powell's passion for what he does in his report from the Furman room at CES. AJ Conti, the man behind turntable manufacturer Basis Audio, has a similar passion for what he does. His current attention is focused on getting the drive belts for his well-regarded turntables as flat as possible, to eliminate the last vestige of drive-system spuriae from the audio recovered from vinyl. Dissatisfied with the highest precision he could get from commercial ground-belt vendors, he invested in his own production machinery.

The result is the Basis Revolution Belt, a seamless belt claimed to be flat along its circumference to within two ten-thousandths of an inch. To prove it, AJ brought his test rig to CES. The belt is rolled over precision bearings, with a lever giving 1x, 2x, or 5x mechanical advantage used to drive the precision deflection meter shown in my photo. Now that is flat.

Basis also introduced its Vector Model 4 tonearm at CES, but we got so heavily into a discussion of turntable drive systems and belts that I forgot to take notes. :-(