LATEST ADDITIONS

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 <I>McIntosh...For the Love of Music</I>. "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."

I got an email from <I>Stereophile</I> 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 <I>very</I> promising, I thought.

I couldn't resist posting this photo, not of a product, but of <I>photos</I> 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 Canadian <A HREF="http://www.gershmanacoustics.com/">Gershman</A&gt; 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.

Stephen Mejias mention Garth Powell's passion for what he does in his <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/011207furman/">report from the Furman room</A> 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.

Ultra Systems' Robert Stein cornered me&mdash;in the nicest way possible&mdash;at the <I>Stereophile</I>/<I>Home Theater</I> party Wednesday night, telling me that he had a great new acoustical damping product that I should check out in his booth. I was going to give this one a pass until he mentioned that it's small, easy-to-install, and inexpensive.

This man is electric. More than electric, this man is electricity. The strongest, purest current snaps through him and charges the entire room. We crowd around, unable to fully maintain his flow, but also unable to withdraw. John Atkinson and I settle in closest, occupying the front row. JA follows securely along, constant flickers of acknowledgement and wonder emerge, illuminated moments of understanding and interest. At the same time, however, running in the opposite direction, I feel almost as though I'm being rude — too deeply occupied at scribbling these notes, my pen powered by his words and ideas, moving faster across the page than I want it to go, I can't even look up to meet his eyes. And his eyes, these ice blue darts, they're the blue of a glowing front panel. The man is plugged in.

Bill Greene's photo of a curator examining Whistler's Mother is one of the <I>Boston Globe</I>'s best photographs of 2006. See the shot and listen to Greene tell how he got it.

The 2007 Consumer Electronics Show may be officially over, but you can still read our on-going coverage at our <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/">show blog</A>.

"Recent advances in solid-state output devices and other components have opened up design possibilities never previously available," Audio Research's Terry Dorn explained. "And <I>that</I> led to our developing the Hybrid Drive HD220 stereo power amplifier ($8995)."