Now I know why Robert Deutsch wrote such an enthusiastic review of the Fujitsu Ten Eclipse TD712z loudspeaker in the January 2007 issue of Stereophile. This eye-arresting single-driver loudspeaker ($7000/pair with dedicated stands) delivered an absolutely beautiful rendering of Monica Salmazo's voice. Both top and midrange were exemplary, as was transparency. Though early instrument strings on the delightful Channel Classics SACD, Bolivian Baroque v.2, were either a mite too edgy or conveyed with unforgiving accuracy, the system did a wonderful job with the church venue's naturally reverberant acoustic. Soprano Kate Royal's voice on her marvelous EMI debut recital was drop dead gorgeous. Within their frequency limitations, these speakers are superb. And given that the source was a Denon 955 DVD player rather than a state-of-the-art unit, their triumph is even more noteworthy.

April Music's tremendous achievement deserves two blog entries. In one room at the Alexis Park, the Korean-based company demmed an absolutely amazing for the price Stello stack of low-cost, truly high-end mini components: the Stello CDT-100 transport ($695), DA100 Signature ($895), HP100 headphone amp/preamp ($595), and S100 50W/channel power amplifier ($745). Auditioning Harmonia Mundi's beautiful recording of Schubert's Arppeggione Sonata, this diminutive set-up (complete with B&W 805 loudspeakers and Red Rose cabling) created an amazingly deep, involving soundstage that would make many a manufacturer of components costing 10 times the Stello price envious. The system also did a fine job of capturing the complex harmonics of the piano. An I²S bus connection between components—shades of Audio Alchemy and Perpetual Technologies—sure helps matters. I wouldn't go as far as saying that this set-up fully captured the soul of every piece of music I auditioned, or that its solid-state pedigree wasn't apparent, but it blew the socks off most mass-market doo-doo and a helluva lot of supposedly audiophile-grade components.

April Music is targeting a younger demographic with this line-up. For a dorm system or office, I doubt the factory-direct Stello stack, available only through hifi500.com, can be beat for such a low price. Products are shipped from Chicago, and are supported by April Music reps in Seattle and Lexington, KY.

After hearing the Stello stack, I thought I had heard it all. But in the next room, April Music President Simon K. Lee blew my mind even more with the one-piece Aura note Music Center ($1850). This little baby, available through a dealer network, even includes a USB port on back, a second USB memory stick port on the side, a built-in tuner, and two RCA inputs. Paired with the Aura speaker ($650/pr), the parallel single-ended MOSFET design (thank you, Nelson Pass) sounded a bit more mellow and soulful than the Stello stack. (It would have probably extended as low as that stack if it had been paired with the B&Ws).

Lee and I had a wonderful time playing Karina Gauvin's recording of Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne. After he had copied down the record information so that he could buy a copy for himself, I followed up with soprano Kate Royal's miraculously poised, heartfelt rendition of Canteloube's "La delaïssádo." Lee was astounded to learn that the beautiful, mature voice he had just heard was produced by a woman not yet 30.

April Music thus brought me two joys in one: fine sound, and the special communication between music lovers that transcends verbiage. If you're shopping for a bargain system, whether or not space is a consideration, by all means look here.

More than once, I've teased Convergent Audio Technology's Ken Stevens about calling his preamp SL-1 Ultimate. I mean, once you've got something that's the Ultimate, where can you go if it's improved—and there is no audio product that can't be improved, even if only to a minor degree. He subsequently introduced a preamp called the SL-1 Legend, but it was about double the price of the SL-1 Ultimate, and Ken said that it was sufficiently different from the SL-1 Ultimate that it could be considered a new preamp, deserving of a new name.

Well, Ken now has an update of the SL-1 Ultimate, using much of the technology borrowed from the Legend: improvements in the power supply, passive A/V pass-through, switch-selectable high/low gain, and—most important for phono fans—built in moving-coil transformers that result in a much-improved S/N ratio in this application. He calls this preamp SL-1 Renaissance. (And, I suspect, he may regret ever having used the word "Ultimate" to refer to his preamp.) Price for the SL-1 Renaissance is $7950 for the line-level version and $9950 for the version that includes the phono section. (The Legend comes in at the industry-standard-high-end-preamp price of $18k.)

Hovland introduced a new preamp; in fact it was so new that it hasn't been named yet, and the price hasn't been determined ($16k–$18k range). The only thing known for sure is that it's a solid-state design, with balanced inputs and outputs, and has the blue back-lighting that Hovland is known for. It's another contender for the “Most Beautiful $18k Preamp” title.

Also being demmed in the Hovland room was a prototype of a transport/ripper/DAC. Based on a Linux platform and styled to match the new preamp, this uses a laptop DVD drive not only to play back discs via a 2GB buffer, but also to rip them to a network drive. Using the new preamp and a pair of Hovland Stratos 400W solid-state monoblocks driving Avalon Eidolon Diamond speakers, with Hovland cables, Hovland’s Alex Crespi used it to play JA Eric Clapton’s "Old Love" (from 24 Nights) from his Apple laptop running iTunes. JA was mightily impressed. Alex then followed that by playing two versions of a baroque voice/harp recording, the only difference being that one was an uncompressed AIF file and the other was lossless-compressed ALC. The data presented to the DAC were identical yet the AIF sounded better. JA walked out of the room vowing to forget what he had just heard! "Just too audible for comfort," he was heard muttering.

"What's new?" I asked the Canadian company's affable Lionel Goodfield on the last day of CES.

"Nothing...but we are getting great sound from Dynaudio's new Sapphire speaker. Source is the two-box Moon Andromeda CD player that Brian Damkroger reviewed for Stereophile in January and amp is the Moon Evolution i-7 integrated."

I sat down and took a listen to some of the tracks from my Editor's Choice CD. Nice. Very nice. An enormous soundstage, detail to die for, and extended lows and highs, yet without the sound being artificially thrown forward at the listener.

As it was Lionel's room, I photographed him with the Andromeda and the i-7, but those Dynaudio speakers are something special indeed.

The Sumiko suite at CES provided a huge listening space to introduce the new Vienna Acoustics' full-range, four-way Die Musik loudspeaker ($25,000/pair). Designed by Peter Gansterer (see photo), a pair of Die Musiks produced some of the best sound I heard at the show. The speakers were positioned quite far apart against a side wall, and the listener sat on a couch closer to the plane between the speakers than the distance between the speakers. This created a very wide, coherent soundstage quite unlike any other than I heard at the show. Bass response, which was superb, actually could be credited, in part, to a huge REL Studio 3 subwoofer, which was parked and running in the nearest room corner.

John-Paul Lizars, Director of Marketing at Sumiko Audio, walked me through the loudspeaker's design. Most important, the midrange and treble frequencies originated from an adjustable head module that can be exactly positioned with resettable screw settings that angles the midrange-tweeter coincident driver both horizontally and vertically. The midrange is not a cone, but a planar driver. All other drivers use Vienna Acoustics' proprietary cone material, which is stiffened with glass fiber and thin metal spines. The enclosure was finished in a beautiful Sapelle Wood mahogany veneer that "resembles the veneers used in the old Chris Kraft speedboats of the 1950s," said Lizars.

I corresponded briefly a while back with Gary Koh, CEO of Genesis. Gary has owned the company for the past five years, and moved it from its original home in Colorado to Seattle, Washington. When he took over the company, he was aware that his background was in computer software, not electronics. He decided that this could be an advantage. "Not being an engineer, I didn't know what was impossible. This explains to some degree the types of projects I've decided to take on, and those that have been achieved."

One problem he encountered was that the top loudspeakers in the Genesis line had very low impedances, restricting the choice of amplifier. Gary Koh raising the Genesis 5.2's minimum impedance to 3 ohms to create the 186 lb, $16,000/pair Genesis 5.3. This is a four-way, sealed, floorstanding loudspeaker. There are two 1" circular-ribbon tweeters, one front and one rear, that cover the spectrum above 3.5kHz. The midrange transducer is one Genesis 5" titanium-cone unit, and there are two 6.5" aluminum-cone midbass units. The powered subwoofer section rolls in below 120Hz and uses a 500W servo-bass amplifier to drive three 8" ribbed aluminum-cone drivers. Crossover are 4th-order, except for the bass–midbass region, which has 2nd-order characteristics.

The sound of the 5.3s, powered by Genesis new class-D Reference amplifier, was fast, transparent, and detailed, though with some compression evident on massed orchestral passages. Afterwards, Koh remarked, "You really like to torture loudspeakers with your demo records."

"Yes," I said with some pleasure, "that's what I do."

Paul Barton, founder and chief designer of PSB Speakers International, plans to manufacture a new series of loudspeakers he is calling "Imagine." This line will feature new finishes and styling. The enclosures will be curved, both front to back and top to bottom. To create this shape, PSB is laminating multiple layers of MDF, w2hich is then braced to a mold. Radio frequency waves are directed at the enclosure shell for 15 seconds that quickly sets the glue. Once the enclosure is stable, holes are machined as the exact places required, which eliminates the tedious job of making ultra-precise adjustments when an enclosure is built around the drivers. PSB also uses a method of adding color after the first coat of clear sealant is applied to the veneer, so the resulting finish shows the wood grain but also has a rich, red color.

PSB showed prototypes of four different "Imagine" loudspeakers at their suite at the Hard Rock: a two-way $800/pair bookshelf using a 1" tweeter and a 5.25" way design woofer; a larger, floorstanding, "2.5-way" "Imagine" priced at $1500/pair that utilizes the same tweeter but two 5.25" woofers; a $300 center-channel speaker; and a not-priced-as-yet surround speaker.

Paul played the floorstanding "Imagine" loudspeakers for me using my own CDs. The speakers performed extremely well. I heard bits of the music—such as the bass line that backs up JA's recording of the Jerome Harris Quintet playing The Mooche (CD, Rendezvous, Stereophile STPH013-2) that I had not heard from much more expensive loudspeakers at other exhibits.

Albert Von Schweikert is on the move. After any number of Von Schweikert lovers have asked for smaller, space-saving speakers that function optimally tucked into corners or up against walls, Von Schweikert Audio is about to launch the Studio Signature Series. With three models, the Unifields 1, 2, and 3 ($6000, $10,000, and $15,000/pair respectively) and optional polished marble stands, the Signature speakers are designed to "compete with guys who build $20,000 monitors." The Unifield 1's frequency response is said to be 40Hz—22kHz; the 2 offers 32Hz—22kHz; and the 3 boasts a whopping 32Hz–50kHz. Not bad for a small speaker, eh?

Von Schweikert has discontinued its online store, which was so unpopular with US dealers that a number jumped ship. Instead, the company is opening two factory stores, one in LA, the other in Manhattan. Modeled after the Bose stores, but with thankfully better sound, the establishments have been acoustically designed to sound like concert halls. Von Schweikert plans to use the stores as both merchandising entities and training facilities, flying in dealers to school them in proper presentation.

Von Schweikert has also just debuted what are intended to be extremely neutral-sounding cables. Designed by the chief design engineer of the Aerospace Division at AC Delco, the interconnects cost $750, speaker cables $2500, and power cables something that Albert couldn't remember because they're so new.

"We don't have a price yet, because the TAD Compact Reference One Monitor loudspeaker is a prototype," stated Andrew Jones, lead engineer for loudspeakers at TAD Laboratories, Inc., shown here in John Atkinson's photo. "I can say that it will be somewhere between zero dollars and $60,000, the cost of a pair of our full-sized TAD Reference One speakers."

Jones went on to explain that he had built the prototype three-way monitor just last month, using the same materials found in the Reference One. Thus, the enclosure uses laminated 1"-thick MDF, with an extruded-aluminum rear panel that acts as a base for mounting the crossover boards. Besides the company's concentric upper-frequency unit, which mounts a beryllium-dome tweeter within the midrange cone, the stand-mounted monitor employs the same 8" midbass driver that had appeared in the previous iteration of TAD's floorstanding, four-way, Model One loudspeaker.

Jones then paused to update the history of his company. TAD originated as a "skunkworks" enterprise within Pioneer to bring some of the practical designs of pro audio into the home audio marketplace. "Now we are becoming serious," mused Jones," for we just become a fully incorporated division of Pioneer, and have been renamed the Pioneer TAD Laboratories, Incorporated." In the companies new form, it will expand manufacturing to include electronics as well as loudspeakers.

The compact monitor was driven by TAD's newest product, a 150-lb, class-A, solid-state, 300W (into 4 ohms) monoblock, price and model number not yet available. This amplifier was designed in Japan by Katsuhiro Sasaki, lead engineer of TAD Laboratory Electronics. "Katsuhrio-san created a class-A amplifier that is efficient, so it doesn't have to dissipate 1200 watts of heat constantly." The amplifier is further stabilized by giving it ½"-thick aluminum side panels and mounting it on a cast-iron base.

Jones and Katsuhiro-san played a high-resolution digital file of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, recorded by Keith Johnson for Reference Recordings. The TAD Compact Reference Monitor seemed every bit as dynamic as the larger Reference One in the next room, and played at very high levels with no sign of compression. However, the speaker is still a work in progress, and will benefit from the development plans Jones has in mind. "Perhaps next winter we'll have a preproduction model of the Compact Reference One ready. Stay tuned."

The Liberty system is a "theater system in a box," explained Greg Williams, B&W's Director of Business Development, New Media. For a suggested retail price of $18,000, the Liberty includes the PVW1 powered subwoofer in the photo; the XTW powered Center speaker; 4 XTW8 powered column speakers; and the CP-1 wireless transmitter–control center. Power for each loudspeaker is supplied by built-in class-D amplification. The CP-1 console contains a wireless transmitter good for a distance of 100 meters, an AM/FM/HD digital radio, the CDP-300 DVD/CD/MP3 player (a $7000 product), and a SSP 600 preamplifier (a $4500 product).

The Liberty was not set up to play live music. B&W representatives thought that CES would be an unusual challenge for any wireless system because of extremely heavy cell phone and other wireless traffic.

D&M Holding is the name of the company that owns Marantz, McIntosh, Boston Acoustics, and several other audio/video brands; they had a mini-exhibit of their own at the Mandalay Bay. There were some formal home-theater demos, but I didn't have time to sit through those. However, I did get a good look at the new SM-11S1 Reference Power Amplifier (110Wpc, $3999), SC-11S preamplifier ($2999), and SA-11S1 two-channel SACD/CD player ($3499) from Marantz. Gorgeous stuff. Michael Fremer has these for review.

Conrad-Johnson Design, well-known purveyors of vacuum-tube electronics, introduced the ET2 Enhanced Triode preamplifier, featuring a single-ended triode voltage gain stage direct-coupled to a high-current output buffer. For once, this is not another $18k preamp; the price is a relatively modest $3500.

Conrad-Johnson was also showing the CD2B ($8500), which marries a tubed analog output section to a DAC that handles both CDs and SACDs. Details were tantalizingly scarce, but Lew Johnson and Bill Conrad expect to ship the unit by "mid-year."

Since CJ always sets up a static display at CES, there was nothing to listen to—other than Conrad and Johnson—so Wes Phillips sat down and talked for a spell. “Other than designing four new products, what have you been up to?” he asked.

"I built Bill and me a music server," said Lew Johnson. ""I searched out special low-noise computers, put a few TB of storage in them, and output an S/PDIF signal to one of our DACs. It sounds pretty good, if you're not up to playing your records."

Any chance CJ might make a music server?

"We think that computer companies can do a better job of most aspects of that," said Bill Conrad. "And for a lot less money, too. But computer guys think that digital-to-audio conversion is a trivial matter, which it is not. Take the DAC out of the computer environment and use a good 'un—ours are pretty good—and you've got what you need."

So are you having fun with your new music servers?

"I need to get started on putting discs in mine," Conrad confessed.

New Zealand-based Plinius is now using words drawn from the Maori language to name all of its new products. Making truly beautiful sounds in an all-Plinius line-up, the new Tautoro linestage preamplifier ($7300), set to ship in May, fulfilled its promise to "bridge the gap" from Plinius' top-of-the-line SA-Reference power amplifier to its CD-101 CD player and Koru phono stage (available as an option for $8600 total). When I asked Scott Markwell of Elite Audio Video Distribution how the preamp differs from its M8 predecessor, he pointed out that the M8 could only function as a linestage. "The more versatile Tautoro has an even bigger, more three dimensional soundstage. It also has much greater bass, more punch, and increased dynamics."

Lord knows the system was filling the room with colorful, commanding, and innately musical sound. No wonder John Marks is so enamored of the stuff. Although I didn't get a chance to play John's new organ recording in the room, I'm certain the equipment would do it justice.

It's always fun to drop in to the Burmester Suite. When Dieter Burmester, the firm's founder (left), and Udo Besser, the CEO (right), are not working on the latest sound system updates to the 1.2 million Euro Bugatti Veryon 16.4 supercar, they build massive loudspeakers and amplifiers for home consumers and audiophiles.

This year, they were eager to show me the new baby Burmester, the $12,000/pair, 60-lb, three-way, floorstanding B-25 speaker. The company's flagship B-100, by comparison, costs over 6 times as much, weighs four times is much, and is twice as tall. The differences were so great that I had a challenge getting both loudspeakers in the same picture!

While the B-25 uses the standard Burmester configuration of tweeter, midrange, and side-firing woofer, details differ. The tweeter is not a ribbon, but an Air Motion Transformer like the Oscar Heil driver. The midrange is a 5.1" Kevlar cone, and the woofer is a 6.5" by 8" oval driver with a double-vented voice-coil. Nomina impedance is 4 Ohms. The model shown had a beautiful Macassar, mahogony-like veneer.

Playing my own recordings, I was struck by the small loudspeakers' upper bass response, and their ability to image male vocalists in a holographic manner with natural timbre.

The highlight of the VRS Audio Solutions room was witnessing VRS' Vincent R. Sanders and Neil Sinclair (high-end pioneer and former owner of Theta Digital) engage in a heated discussion over optimal methods for achieving hard disk-stored music playback. These two went at it as if dealing with life and death itself. Which, in the case of high-end audio, isn't far from the truth.

Sanders has created the VRS Revelation DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), "a three-component sonic solution based on the Apple/Mac platform that consists of playback software, an external clock, and an external DAC....The VRS Revelation DAW will extract digital audio from CDs and DVDs, download high-resolution music files, and record analog sources, then play all back in ultra-fidelity." Sanders has been perfecting the system for years, and hopes to have it on the market within six months.

VRS isn't the only game in town, of course. Not by a long shot. But Sanders insistence that he pulls data from discs by simply copying it, rather than using algorithms that manipulate bits while ripping data, challenged Sinclair's experience. "I've used every ripping agent out there," said Sanders, "and each one sounds different. It's the same with every lossless compressed file. If you reconstruct a lossless compressed file, you change the data."

Sinclair retorted that he had listened to every ripping agent and lossless compression scheme out there, and did not think that all of them manipulated and contorted data to the point of audibility. Or something to that effect.

As the conversation progressed—and progress it did—each learned that the had both been professional percussionists in former lifetimes. Sinclair also spent a brief period working as a mastering engineer. Thus Sanders struck a chord when he passionately declared, "We need studio quality, not CD quality... I want a system that allows you to hear the whole heart and soul I poured it out as a studio musician. You can't get that by burning a CD."

Sanders went on to criticize USB, which he asserts was never designed to convey audio, and instead praised firewire. "USB2 can finally do 24/96," he said, "but it can neither do multi-channel nor convey Reference Recordings' 24/176.4."

My two cents. Whichever way does it best (that I can afford) works for me. I applaud these two men for their commitment to helping us achieve Audio Nirvana.

When I first received an email from ESS announcing a new DAC, I assumed someone had revived the old Electro Static Sound, but I was wrong.

"We've been making semiconductors since 1984," sales and marketing VP Robert Wong told me. "We started out making voice chips for talking dolls and toys, then got heavily into chips for soundcards and games, and eventually made chips for cell phones and CD video players. However, we are totally committed to quality and the competition is increasingly price-based for components that are 'almost as good.' We don't do almost as good. We make instrument grade parts."

Enter Martin Mallinson, an engineer who had put in years designing ICs for Analog Devices. Mallinson had an idea for a completely new kind of DSD/PCM DAC the company has dubbed the Sabre Audio DAC.

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I have seen few turntables, no any mechanical devices more likely to induce flat-out gadget lust than the $150,000 Transrotor Artus. It has a magnetically coupled drive assembly, which means no points of contact between motor and platter. It's machined from solid billets of high-grade aluminum, finished to an impeccable sheen. Its deck is gimbal-mounted to freakishly huge counterweights for absolute level and stability (think gyroscope here). Its power supply uses something called "Konstant M3," which I gather is pretty special, but my limited German and the Transrotor rep's far less limited English prevented me from determining in what way.

All I know is that when he switched it on and the drive's outrider counterweights started spinning and the platter started moving, I was quite simply mesmerized. It reminded me of Harrison's H1 chronometer in the Royal observatory.

At $150,000, it appears that you can purchase cool.