The advantage of going wireless, of course, is that for rear channels in particular, there can be no more of those significant-other–annoying wires draped across the floor. The KEF Wireless System features a transmitter that connects to the owner's A/V receiver and two matching wireless receivers, one of which is seen here powering the English company's R203/2 bookshelf speaker.

The little module features a 25W (50W peak) switching amplifier and the 2.4GHz WiFi link uses channel-hopping technology to achieve the necessary signal robustness. A second version is available as plug-in module for the KEF KHT 5000 Series lifestyle speakers and both Wireless Systems, each including one transmitter and two receivers, will be available in the first quarter of the year for $499.99.

English speaker company Monitor Audio has been producing a range of excellent affordable speakers since its managment buyout nine years ago, including the Silver RS6 tower that so impressed Bob Reina last March. Their suite at the Hilton, however, saw the Platinum series, an assault on the state of the speaker art from a design team led by Dean Hartley (above).

In the bookshelf Platinum 100 ($4295/pair plus stands) and the tower Platinum 300 ($8995/pair) a wide-bandwidth, ceramic-coated ribbon tweeter, combined with lower-range drivers that use aluminum-honeycomb diaphragms and baffles cast from mineral-loaded polymer to provide mass, stiffness, and high self-damping, finished with Strathspey leather, and subtly curved enclosures finished in piano lacquers.

The Platinums were being demmed with Musical Fidelity electronics and sounded very promising. Availability wil be May 2007.

Wanting to hear more of newest addition to the line that includes the Andra II, successor to Stereophile's 1997 "Loudspeaker of the Year," I visited Egglestonworks' second The Nine room after the Show's first day closed at 5pm. Here I discovered a wonderful depth to the presentation, thanks to McCormack's UDP-1 universal player and DNA-500 amplification, as well as to the Kubala-Sosna cabling. The treble was also nicely focused. Alas, despite another round of Echo Buster room treatment and a striking-looking Grand Prix rack, The Nine's bass control was defeated by the room's square dimensions.

I would have like to have played soprano Elly Ameling singing Schubert in order to further evaluate the speaker's top end, but the folks in the adjoining BAT-Magico room seem determined to be heard all the way to Kansas.

After encountering several rooms filled with overly warm, romanticized tube sound, it was a welcome shock to discover tube gear from Rogue that sounded far more neutral. Alas, the sound from Rogue’s Zeus amplifier (225Wpc, $7495) and prototype reference-level linestage preamp seemed a bit soft around the edges, lacking detail. However, who knows how much of what I heard was due to the plethora of Echo Buster paneling with which the exhibitors had tried to tame the room's acoustics. Paired with the Egglestonworks The Nine ($12,900/pair), introduced at the show, I heard much promise until competition from adjoining rooms forced me to retreat. What I did learn is the speaker uses an 8" Morel woofer, two of the same 6" Morel drivers featured in the company's earlier Andra 2, and an Eggleston favorite, the Dynaudio Ecostar tweeter. Available in virtually any automotive color, the speaker will start shipping in March.

For their room at the 2007 CES, VTL's Bea Lam and Luke Manley spent six hours carefully moving the Eidelons from one position to another, fine-tuning their placement to provide full-range, amazingly controlled sound in what was virtually a square cubicle. Paired with the VTL TL7.5 Mk.2 preamp, the VTL Stereo 400 amp produced warm, sweet, romanticized sound. By comparison, the long-awaited 450 autobias monoblocks, which go into production right after the show, were more neutral in color, as well as fuller and warmer in the bass. Piano and bass in Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, played by Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexandre Tharaud (Harmonia Mundi), proved an especially rich delight. Although booming music from the next room did Schubert in after a few minutes, I left this room smiling.

Mikey had brought along to the JBL Everest demo CD-Rs burned with dubs of his favorite LPs played on his Continuum Caliburn turntable. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Orbison, Joni Mitchell, and John Lennon, but it was when Mikey asked Greg to play track one on the second CD-R that the listeners visibly relaxed and the room filled up with good vibes.

Even Everest designer Greg Timbers (left) and veteran classical recording engineer and JBL alum John Eargle (third from right) loosened up as we all lowered ourselves into the warm audio bath of the Dead's "Uncle John's Band," from Working Man's Dead. Now that's music! And on the Everests, we wanted for nothing more. Well, maybe some of those herbal smokes...

We finished the listening sessions with some of John Eargle's recent classical recordings for the Delos label, which the Everests handled with the same sonic aplomb with which they had recreated the 1970s Dead. John has just written an authorized history of JBL, which we will get hold of and review when it is published.

A number of Stereophile writers have been having unexpected musical moments with JBL's massive horn-loaded K2 9800 loudspeaker at recent shows, but the 2007 CES saw the US debut of the awesome Everest ($60,000/pair).

Designed, like the K2 9800, by veteran JBL engineer Greg Timbers, whom I first interviewed 25 years ago when he was working on the JBL 250, the Everest represents the Californian company's ultimate effort to achieve high-end sound from high-efficiency, horn-loaded drivers.

With a pair of Everests driven by a Lexicon disc player and Mark Levinson amplification, both Michael Fremer (above) and I sat with our mouths open at the lack of midrange congestion, the absence of intermodulation distortion, the low-frequency extension, the superbly stable stereo imaging, and the enormous dynamic range.

Wow!

Rives Audio and Talon Audio (now owned by Rives) proudly introduced the Thunderhawk, a $25,000/pair, composite speaker consisting of the $10,000 Hawk positioned atop the Thunder cabinet. The latter’s woofer is available either with a passive crossover, or with the new Rives Sub Parc, fully adjustable active crossover, which includes a 1000W switching amplifier. Said to deliver full-range sound down to 18Hz, the system sounded absolutely seductive playing jazz vocalist Susanne Abbuehl’s Compass (ECM).

Credit goes equally to two VAC Phi 300.1 Reference amplifiers bridged in mono mode to produce 300W for $34,000, connected by Shunyata cabling to the Wadia Reference Transport 270 SE, Wadia 931 Digital Controller, and Wadia 921 two-chassis Decoding Computer. (That’s four units total, folks, and they ain’t cheap). Power was conmditoned by the Shunyata Hydra 8 power conditioner, Yes, the sound was undeniably warm, but it offered irresistible, all-enveloping unforced intimacy and detail. Despite brass whose percussive edges were softened a bit, the system’s mystical expanse of sound was a wonder to experience. Certainly Talon's Richard Rives Bird (left) and VAC's Kevin Hayes (right) weren't feeling too unhappy with the sound.

Thiel Audio had the benefit of several side-by-side rooms at the Venetian, one of which was reserved for listening with the door closed. Isolated from the noise of surrounding rooms, Thiel’s long-awaited CS3.7 speaker ($9900/pair in standard finishes when it’s finally released), and now actually boasting a grille, played an intriguing combination of two-channel and multi-channel music using Bryston electronics and Synergistic Research cabling.

Synergistic’s new zero-capacitance cables include active shielding that produced, I felt, a warmer, more analog-like sound than one might have expected from the solid-state Bryston amplification. Thanks to new engineering inspired by the work of Nicola Tesla, the cabling is thin and flexible. With a radical new geometry—Synergistic’s first major change in its cable technology in 15 years—the line’s new middle level cabling is claimed to outperform their old top-of-the-line at one third the price. I wish Synergisitic's Ted Denney’s controlled demo had given me more time to get to the heart of the music, but his presentation was about hearing what you could hear in less-than-a-minute increments.

One of the bugbears of mounting speakers—and especially subwoofers—in a wall is that the drive-unit behavior depends on the less-than-rigid behavior of the sheetrock. Most manufacturers of architectural speakers get around this by using a back box to provide the correct acoustic loading. THX's Laurie Fincham (who is going to hate me for referring him as one of the grand old men of English audio) had a different idea.

What if, he thought, you used a large number of small drive-unit pairs, each in its own sub-enclosure and connected facing each other with their chassis joined so that the vibrations could mutually cancel? (Memories of Laurie's force-canceling woofer arrangement in the KEF R104/2 speaker of the early 1980s surface in my mind.) That way, the mechanical properties of the wall would become irrelevant. Reproduction of a high-level 20Hz tone to meet the THX requirement requires pumping a liter of air 20 times each second, but that could be achieved by using sufficient small drivers.

Laurie discussed the idea with speaker manufacturer BG, and the result is the BG BX-4850 THX Certified Ultra2 subwoofer, conprising four modules, each containing 12 metal-cone woofers and arranged in balanced pairs. (Double bass player Laurie calls this "Balanced Bass Line.")

Laurie is shown here holding (with help) one of the prototype modules. The 12 drivers fire into a central cavity, sealed to the top, bottom, and rear, with a narrow 26" x 4" slot opening to the room. The module is mounted between the studs and faced with sheet rock, but transmits no vibrations to the wall itself. The 48 woofers in the four modules, each with a peak excursion of 8mm at <2% THD, have a total radiating area equal to a two 18" drivers, yet fit completely inside a standard 2x4" stud-wall.

Each pair of modules is driven by a dedicated 1200W amplifier/digital crossover module, and a slave 1200W amplifier drives another two modules. Four modules are required for the THX Ultra2-certified subwoofer, which is expected to retail for around $4995 including crossover and amplifiers when it is available for sale in the second quarter of 2007. But two modules ($2995) will still qualify for THX Select certification, and while one module can be used, for $1995, this will not be THX-certified.

A dem of the 4-module subwoofer, with BG's line-source planar in-walls, was very impressive, with obviously low distortion and superb low-frequency extension. Perhaps it's time for this reporter to stop turning up his nose at in-wall speakers.

Jason Victor Serinus adds: The coaxial unit's midrange cone is composed of X3P, a plastic polymer that, when heated, cooks from the outside toward the center. The result is a plastic of uncommon rigidity that is said to lack the sound of plastic.

Not only is the entire speaker slanted backward at a 15° angle for time alignment, but the tweeter section can also move forward and to the left and right for further accuracy. While specs are not yet available, the speaker is due out this year. The goal of designer/company founder Peter Gansterer, who is based in Vienna, Austria, is to create an eminently listenable speaker that presents recorded detail without the highs becoming piercing.

I also spoke with Sumiko about the near omni-present REL subwoofer in their active Vienna Acoustics displays. The REL is meant solely to reinforce the lowest bass notes at the bottom of a speaker’s range, and is active in the upper teens through approximately 30Hz.

Convergent Audio Technologies' SL-1, in its various iterations, has been my reference preamp for some time. When the SL-1 Ultimate came out, I kidded designer Ken Stevens about the fact this designation implied that there was simply no way to improve it, so what was he going to do when—inevitably, in my view—he found ways to tweak the design? Well, sure enough, the SL-1 Ultimate is now the SL-1 Ultimate Mk.II, and Ken has a new preamp called the Legend, which is said to be even better. Improvements over the Ultimate Mk.II include a Teflon circuit board, Black Gate electrolytic capacitors, separate left and right volume controls, and a constrained-layer aluminum/steel bottom plate. An interesting feature is that the AV bypass works even without the preamp being turned on, saving tube life. The price is $15,995, which makes the $7995 for the Ultimate Mk.II seem like a positive bargain.

The rooms at the Venetian Hotel that are named after famous Venetians (Marco Polo, Galileo, Bellini, et al), with their ultra-high ceiling, are proving to be a definite challenge for exhibitors. (The rooms in the Venetian Tower, which I haven’t visited yet, are said to be better.) One of the more successful in taming these rooms’ acoustical challenges was Lyngdorf. Of course, this is the all-singing, all-dancing, DSP-corrected RoomPerfect^TM system, which is designed to deal with room anomalies. And that it did, the sound from the "2+2" system (two main speakers out from the wall and two subwoofers against the wall) sounding uncommonly well-balanced. Designer Jan A. Pedersen is looking pleased, as well he should be.

People whose memories go back a long way may remember Dick Sequerra’s highly-regarded Metronome Seven loudspeakers. They haven't been made for some years, but the importers of Thorens products have prevailed on Dick Sequerra to start making them, and a pair of these (serial No.3) was being used in a system that included a Thorens turntable (natch), Ron Sutherland’s PhD phono stage and Direct Line Stage, and new $15,000/pair Thorens monoblocks. The speakers are designated Metronome 7.7 Mk.6, and are priced at $1995/pair. Very nice sound, especially considering the fact that the system was in one of the Venetian rooms with ceilings that are much higher than any normal home. Here are Ron Sutherland and Thorens importer Chuck Kennedy, kneeling at the altar of High Fidelity.

Since my first CES, in 1979, I have always enjoyed the chance encounters in the corridors. Some of these turn out to be with people who, unknown at the time, end up being audio superstars. I don't know whether Larry Forbes will succeed, but he certainly has the passion. His Klee Cables use flat, thin conductors of different metals and he has applied for a patent for this conductor configuration, having not found any prior art. Well yes, Larry admits, Goertz did something similar, but that didn't involve different metals. You can contact Larry at Larry_Forbes@hotmail.com.

Italian manufacturer Simetel, who makes tube amplifiers with a distinctively "retro" appearance, showed its new Nightingale Gala two-chassis power amplifier in one of the Venetian's lower-level rooms. Tubed power supply is one chassis, the tubed amplification stage, using 300Bs, is is on the second. Projected price is $16,000, and Simetel has now set up its own US distributor. Designer and company founder Luciano Del Rio stands by the silver-finish Gala (black is also available), which was being demmed with Revolver Cygnis speakers.

The mark of a great large speaker is that it can sound small when the music demands it. Such was the case with the humongous La Sphère speaker from French manufacturer Cabasse, one of the many high-end companies who chose to “outboard” this year at an off-site hotel. With its four-way coaxial design, it resembles a scaled-up version of the Baltic that Mikey Fremer reviewed in September 2005, but is fully active with the crossover realized in the digital domain. Demonstrated in a large room with Cabasse’s own amplification and Bel Canto preamp and source components, it offered tremendous dynamic range and loudness capability on full-scale orchestral music and film soundtracks (for which the pair of Spheres was joined by a full surround system and a subwoofer using a 22” driver). For me, however, the magic was greatest when Christopher Cabasse (shown standing with his company’s creation) played a two-channel recording of solo violin and piano, proving that La Sphère can be a quiet speaker when necessary.

Because of the restrictions placed on merchandise sales at CES, the usual Acoustic Sounds booth, stocking much-in-demand LPs, SACDs, and CDs, was nowhere to be found. But the Kansas company still had a display room showing the hardware lines it distributes, including Thorens, Sutherland, and Stirling. But founder Chad Kassem was most proud of the new Analogue Productions LP: the Ultimate Analogue Test LP. Produced by Clark Williams and Barry Wolfson, with input from George Marino and others, cut at Sterling Sound, and pressed on 180gm vinyl by RTI, the Test LP has a selection of tracks to enable the LP lover to optimally set up his system.