Throughout 2006 and much of 2007, we got the feeling at Stereophile that most audiophiles were scoffing at the idea of a music server in their system.

But sometime last year, perceptions changed. Here we are at the 2008 CES and music servers and related products are popping all over the Venetian and at THE Show.

And then there were the surprising online poll results this week.

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I think it's now official: moving the high-performance audio exhibits last year from the Alexis Park to the Venetian has been a complete success. The sound in the tower rooms has been excellent, and exhibitors seem to be finding ways to tame the more problematic acoustics of the large conference rooms on the third floor. And whenever you wanted to take a break, you were only a few steps away from the fake-but-surprisingly-convincing ambience of St. Mark's Square, where it's always early evening, and you don't need an excuse to have some gelato. Ciao!

Immedia's Allen Perkins was running not one, but two Spiral Groove turntables. He was running the original SG1 ($20,000) with Continuum's new Copperhead tonearm ($12,000), but he was also debuting his new SG2 ($15,000) with a Triplanar Ultimate tonearm ($4200).

Differences between the SG1 and SG2 include aluminum motor pulley, platter ring, and clamp, rather than the SG1's stainless steel, and a three-layer aluminum/Sorbothane plinth rather than the five-layer in the original. It also employs a bolted-on armboard rather than bayonet fit. The SG2 weighs about 60 lbs.

"I learned some things building this table," said Perkins. "If it doesn't seem like there's a huge difference in price between the two Spiral Groove 'tables, it's because there's virtually no performance gap between them."

The sound, coming from the new Sonics By Joachim Gerhard Amerigo loudspeakers ($5500/pair), was astonishingly holographic and, well "smooth" isn't quite the right word—mostly I just wanted to fall right into the soundstage and get lost.

I was rocking out in the DeVore Fidelity/Tone Imports room, listening to Polly Jean Harvey. In the midst of the hurly-burly of CES, I was feeling no pain. "I love the way you guys decided to set your Silver Diamondback References up assymetrically," I told JDV.

"It's the only way we could get the separation we needed," said John DeVore. "Those things," he pointed at Tone Imports' EMT TSD cartridge ($2200), the Tone EMT 997 "Banana" tonearm ($4495) and the monophonic Sentech EQ10 phono curve equalizers ($3000/each), "throw such a huge soundstage, we just couldn't do it with the Silverbacks closer together.

The EMT 997 now comes with SME or Ortofon A mounts.

Old-school analog lovers have long been hipped to the pleasures of "long-throw" tonearms—the EMT 997 made a believer out of me.

"The Sonics by Joachim Gerhard Amerigo loudspeakers ($5500/pair) are the first speakers Joachim has ever designed specifically for the American market," said Immedia's Allen Perkins. "I designed the cabinet dimensions and suggested we use an American veneer like Zebrawood or Bird's-Eye maple, then Joachim developed drivers and a crossover network. Funny thing, he said it had the lowest distortion he'd ever measured."

It surely sounded big and beautiful. "Thank you, we think so, too."

How'd you come up with the name?

"Oh, I don't have much imagination. When I designed my first Spiral Groove 'table, it was the SG1, my second was the SG2. For our first speaker for America, I just thought it made sense to honor the guy who first put us on the map."

Stephen Mejias and I trekked out to GamuT/Scandinavian Audio Research (ScAR) house on our travel day after the show closed. We sat down and talked to Lars Goller, formerly drive-unit designer at Vifa/ScanSpeak and chief designer at GamuT and ScAR (OEM drivers).

"We use the method I used to employ at ScanSpeak," said Goller. "I have a great team and I give them ideas about new drivers, then I let them work them out. At the end of the process, I listen, I make changes, and I listen again. I don't really measure that much—at least not in the design part of the process. When I say. 'we are done,' then we measure."

He walked us into the large room of the house, where he had a pair of $130,000/pair GamuT L9s set up. "These are the first GamuT loudspeakers I have designed from a blank sheet of paper—the cabinets, drivers, even the milled brass port flares, that's all me. Would you like to hear some Pink Floyd?"

Indeed we did. Halfway through "Welcome to the Machine," somebody pounded on the door. "Was that an irate neighbor telling you to turn it down?"

"No," said David Stephens, head of marketing for GamuT and ScAR. "It was a dealer prepaying for some L9s."

I would have if I could have.

Stephen Mejias adds: Gamut has completely revamped their top-of-the-line L Series. The new tapered cabinets are not only attractive and indicative of top Danish design, but work to control resonances. The drivers have been coated with a leather treatment—an accidental development which works to soften the speakers' sound, says Lars Goller.

Indeed, the sound of the L7 and flagship L9 seemed gentler than I'd remembered, without sacrificing size, speed, or the ability to fill a large room. I was impressed as Wes had been.

For Stereophile writers, the focus of interest at CES are the exhibits featuring high-performance audio (mostly in the Venetian). That's certainly true for me, but I have to admit to being intrigued by the many sorts of electronic gadgets and gizmos that are shown in the main exhibit halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Sands Expo, so my visit to CES always excludes a brief tour of these venues. And, sometimes, in my wanderings through these halls I even find a product that is interest to audiophiles as well as gadget freaks. I found one such product at the Sands Expo: the Zoom H2 portable audio recorder.

This is a hand-held device that can be considered a successor to the classic Sony Walkman Pro (which I still own, but it needs repair). In keeping with the times, the H2 uses an SD card rather than a cassette as the recording medium, and can record MP3 or WAV files, at quality levels up to 24-bit/96kHz. The H2 has four built-in microphones, two in the front and two in the back, with differing polar response patterns, and records in stereo using either pair or both. The recording can be played back directly through headphones, or transferred to a computer through a USB connection. The Zoom H2 weighs just 110gm without batteries, and costs a mere $199—quite incredible, when you consider its capabilities. I was so taken with the H2 that I bought one, so my Walkman Pro will probably remain unrepaired.

The H2 is shown here by the lovely Sara Stokes. No mere "booth babe," Sara, in addition to being a model, is also a photographer herself, and she instantly identified my camera as being the same as the Canon 5D/24-105L IS that she uses. You can't judge people just by appearances.

The Benchmark DAC1 D/A headphone amplifier has long been our affordable digital recommendation, both in its original form ($975) or with an additional USB data input ($1275, reviewed in the January issue of Stereophile). The DAC1 looked a little different when I went into the Benchmark room at the THE Show; "That's because you're looking at the new DAC1 PRE," explained Rory Rall. The NY company has added a pair of single-ended analog inputs so that the DAC1 can act as the system preamp. It still has digital inputs, of course, though the AES/EBU XLR had to be omitted to make the rear-panel real estate available for the analog inputs. A switch scrolls between the four digital inputs, the USB computer input, and the analog input. The DAC1 PRE is expected to begin shipping in February 2008 and will retail for $1575.

In their suite at the Mirage, Nagra introduced the VPS (Valve Phono Stage), shown here under the Swiss company’s well-regarded PL-L line preamplifier. The front-panel switch selects between A and B inputs and mute, while the rear panel features two sets of inputs and outputs and an output level switch. The A inputs accommodate MC cartridges, while the optional B input can be set for either MM or MC operation. Capacitive and resistive loading can be changed with modules that plug into the pcb close to the input connectors. The MC circuit is based on high-quality transformers wound in-house by Nagra, followed by gain and RIAA stages using ECC81 and ECC83 tubes. The RIAA equalization can be set with internal jumpers either to the 1953 standard or to the 1976 standard. The circuit boards are mounted on compliant supports, to minimize microphony and the power supply is housed in a separate chassis. Unusually, the output can be taken either directly from the tube stage or via a solids-state buffer.

Nagra distributor John Quick demonstrated both options for me, using the new version of Verity Audio's Sarastro speakers driven by Nagra's pyramid-shaped class-D amplifiers and a front end comprising a Basis turntable and arm fitted with what I noted was an EMT MC cartridge. The presentation was more robust-sounding with the solid-state output, with more authoritative low frequencies, but the soundstage was better defined, more delicately delineated, with the tube output. Mikey Fremer is scheduled to review the VPS.

At a press conference on the first day of CES, TEAC Esoteric launched a new range of source components. That was expected. But what was not expected was Esoteric's manager of overseas sales, Kazutaka Tsuda (above), introducing a new monoblock tube amplifier, the AT-100. Using KT88s in its output stage, the 50Wpc Esoteric amp features a new variable bias system and an output transformer using specially treated copper foil as the secondary winding to give the best coupling from the primary. The heaters of the input and driver tubes are DC-powered, to give the lowest noise; in fact, Esoteric claims the AT-100 is extremely quiet, despite its all-tube design. While it was designed as a power amplifier, a rear-panel switch, in conjunction with a volume control knob on its front panel, turns the AT-100 into an integrated, with three RCA inputs ands one XLR. Price will be $18,500.

Jim Wang of Harmonic Technology (right) and Jimmy Ko of Inex Innovation (left) have teamed up to produce the all-in-one Photon Amplicable. Combining the attributes of Harmonic Tech's CyberLight interconnect cables, an amplification system, and speaker cable, the Photon Amplicable allows the user to connect a source or preamp directly to speakers, and to power the system through the cables.

CyberLight cables apply "laser-like and fiber-optic technology to the audio realm....Audio signals at the input are [converted] to light through fiber-optic glass cables and then converted back from light to audio at the output." All this is accomplished in the analog domain, without digitization. As Wang told me in the HT room in The Venetian, the companies take the electron information and convert it to photon information.

The Photon Amplicable elite speaker cable ($12,000) shown in the photograph actually consists of the cable itself, a large power supply, and a small 25W class A/B amp that, in this most unusual context, is claimed to function as though it output somewhere between 100 and 200 watts. Wang claims that the whole shebang transmits the sound of whatever preamp you put in the chain. If you want a tube sound, connect the Photon Amplicable speaker cable to a tube preamp.

I confess that this was the last room I entered during four exhausting days of sensual overload. My blood sugar was low, and Jim's electrons and photons were shooting far over my head rather than piercing my befuddled brain with laser-like sharpness. Apologies to all concerned if I've garbled any of information. The good news is, it all sounds good.

So why is Amanda Sweet from Telarc smiling? Well, in addition to being a wonderful person, she's happy that the Concord Music Group chose to sell its wares in The Venetian. Rather than the nightmare everyone predicted, customers only had to walk 20 steps to the official CES cashiers to purchase their SACDs and CDs from Telarc, Heads Up, Concord, Prestige and the like. With only one other CD vendor—5.1—in the area, Telarc did a booming business.

I'd gone into the DCM room at the end of the day to hear the speaker manufacturer's new Time Frame TFE200 three-way tower, which can be seen at the left of the photo. Using two 6.5" woofers and a midrange mounted above the tweeter, the TFE200 offers a lot of speaker engineering for just $1000/pair. But following my audition of the speakers, driven by Jolida CD player and tube monoblocks, connected with Esoteric USA cables, we were treated to a concert by singer-songwriter Herman Hogan. Al Congdon, the VP of DCM parent company Mitek's Consumer Electronics Group, had heard Hogan playing in a Long Beach coffee house, and liked what he heard. He invited Hogan to perform in the DCM room at CES. You can't beat that live music!

Ever listen to a system costing $340,288? Ray Kimber's IsoMike venture put on such an exhibit at CES to preview their DSD recordings with "no limiting, no compression, no mixing, and no equalization." They had their SACD Hybrid Stereo/4-channel discs next door for sale.

The exhibit featured four Sound Lab ProStat 922 full-range electrostatic, loudspeakers each driven by a Pass Labs X350.5 solid-state amplifier. The huge Sound Lab panels—each panel is 94" tall by 40" wide—were placed into each corner of the room and dwarfed recording engineer Graemme Brown. Other products in the system included EMM Labs electronics, Kimber Kables, and GML room equalization.

Selections played from the company's hard drives included live recordings of the Blue Knight marching band and the Fry Street Quartet. The resulting sound was clean, fast, and very transparent.

What does $275,000 buy you these days besides a used Porsche Carrera GT with 20,000 miles on it? Yes, there is now a loudspeaker system with that asking price, which gets you 900 lbs of hardware, including two midrange—tweeter towers, two subwoofers, and two subwoofer amplifiers. Frequency response is rated from 8Hz to 50kHz, and the minimal load impedance is 3 ohms. Furthermore, the Force is made of glass.

I visited Perfect Eight Technology's suite to find out more. Jons Rantila, Chief Executive Officer, introduced me to his "music sculpture of glass and gold." Glass is used as an enclosure material. Rantila found that bonding together three sheets of thick glass with a special polymer bonding material produced a "super-silent laminate" that had no energy storage properties.

Perfect 8's name refers to the figure-eight dispersion pattern of a perfect dipole. The midrange and tweeter panels stand 79" tall. The tweeter is a proprietary 64" ribbon driver. The midrange frequencies are handled by seven, custom SEAS 7"-cone units. The passive crossovers is encased in matching boxes of semitransparent glass. Four 12" cone subwoofer are fed by a custom active filter and driven by amplifiers that use 9 Milrod 10µF capacitors per side, and contribute $2000 of the cost of the system.

All of this design would be of no important if the sound produced were deficient. I was prepared for, well, I don't know what. I was stunned to hear utterly transparent sound, with the clarity and lucidity of the original Quad's midrange. Selecting "The Mooche" from Stereophile's Editor's Choice CD, I heard the best sound I've heard from all the different loudspeakers on which I have auditioned this recording. Switching to my current "Record to Die For," the Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic (CD, DG 00289477 6198), this orchestral piece sound utterly clean, totally free from distortion, while exhibiting superb subtleties, particularly in the timbre of the woodwinds. The only criticism was that I heard compression on the bass drum beats.

While a $275,000 asking price is other-worldly, so was the sound.

Herman van den Dungen and Marcel Croese, the duo responsible for the Prima Luna line of tube electronics, have introduced a new line of "Good Looking and Good Sounding" solid-state equipment under the HeDo moniker. As with the Prima Luna gear, the prices are very reasonable: $1395 for the HeDo One 80Wpc integrated amplifier, $1795 for the HeDo Two $200Wpc integrated, $1245 for the HeDo Three preamp, and $1495 for the HeDo Four power amp (the power is not listed on the preliminary literature sheet; I assume it's 200Wpc or a bit more). The four components are pictured here in distributor Kevin Deal's room at the Venetian. The frog is an optional extra.

Although Allen Perkins' Spiral Groove has until now focused exclusively on analog products, the company has taken a big step into the digital domain by announcing the forthcoming Spiral Groove DP1 line stage preamp and 24/96 DAC. Projected to become available in four months, the DPI is so new that it has yet to be priced.

The Spiral Groove DAC/preamp, distributed by Perkins' Berkeley-based Immedia Sound, will be sufficiently up-to-date to include an up-to-date USB input. It will also be versatile, with the ability to support either two or three amps. Owners can also equip it with optional crossover boards to enable them to actively cross over speakers. The unit will also include a high-quality attenuator, adjustable in 1dB increments, and a remote control. Expect Spiral Groove phono preamplifiers and amplifiers down the road.

"Whether you're painting or making music or designing a loudspeaker," said Chu, "it really doesn't matter. They're just different artistic mediums. To me, they're all ways to express one's life."

"Any source components?" I asked Cayin importer and VAS Audio maven Sze Leung.

"Wes, I have a whole line—and check this out, they come in classic wood cases, just like the McIntosh, Marantz, and Scott used to!"

They do look nice—in either gloss black lacquer or rosewood. The SP-cd300 CD player ($1695) is transformer coupled and seems to be the only solid-state component in the line. The monoblock 8W SP-20M ($3995/pair) employ 300B SE tubes, the 60Wpc SP-40 stereo power amplifier uses KT88s, and the 35Wpc SP-10A integrated uses four EL24s, two 12AU7s, and a 12AX7 ($1695). Actually, you can buy the SP-10A with 6l6s for 18Wpc or KT88s for 50Wpc—prices vary, based on configuration.)

That's four products with six configurations?

"Oh no," said Leung. "I can supply pretty much any tube you need for any of the base models. You know me, Wes—I like to play with hi-fi.."

Indeed he does.

Franc Kuzma was showing a fascinating tonearm, the $7300–7500 4Point, named because it has unique vertical and horizontal bearings. Kuzma said, "It's like a unipivot tonearm that can't 'chatter' in the horizontal plane."

But well designed unipivots aren't supposed to chatter.

"No, they are not supposed to."

A rigid VTA tower allows repeatable VTA and azimuth adjustments. The tonearm fits on 9" configurations, said Kuzma, but "is effectively 11"."

"And it is biwired," said Kuzma.

???

It has eight special silver-alloy wires coming out of the cartridge. Four of them are continuous to the phono preamp, where they are terminated with Eichmann Bullet connectors, but the other four terminate in a breakout box with Cardas female RCAs, so you can use two different phono sections."

Here's the kicker: I was hipped to the Kuzma tonearm by digital designer Kevin Halverson. "It's the slickest piece of mechanical engineering, I've seen in a long time," Halverson said.