NEW Shanling MC-30
LATEST ADDITIONS
An Incredible Challenge and a Good Hobby
At the GamuT house, the first beauty that caught my eye was their new Phi3 loudspeaker dressed in drop-dead gorgeous zebra wood. "In Europe," said designer Lars Goller, "anything striped is really hot right now."
The GamuT Tweeter
All GamuT speakers sport a ring-radiator tweeter. The pointy thing in the middle is a metal waveguide—the perfect defense against little children poking in the tweeter dome.
Danish Hospitality
GamuT doesn't rent a display room at one of the hotels, instead they figure the best way to show off home loudspeakers is in a home. So they rent a palatial pad in the Las Vegas suburbs, invite us over for dinner (they fly in a Danish cook and assistant) and then we retire to the living room to check out the speakers and electronics.
Classy Class-A
VAS Audio's Sze Leung is the most consistently <I>up</I> audiophile we know—he's always raving about his latest listening session or discovery. "This one's incredible," he exclaimed, pointing to the 80Wpc Cayin H-80A Class-A tube hybrid integrated amplifier (approximately $4000)."
Like a Cathedral
Zanden's Kazutoshi Yamada builds amplifiers like Medieval villages built cathedrals: To glorify the quintessence. Jon Iverson and I were lured into his room because his Model 9600s were so . . . <I>shiny</I> (hey, we're guys, we're not complicated). Then we heard 'em driving the Ascendo System Z-F3 loudspeakers. Wowsers.
Beautiful Singing
Bel Canto's John Stronczer made a bold decision to demonstrate exclusively with a music server streaming Music Giants. He ran the output from his laptop to the $2495 e.One DAC3 digital-to-analog processor and then directly to a pair of e.One REF1000 1000W monoblocks ($1995 each).
The Oldest Trick in the Book
We walked in to the room and spotted a pair of floorstanding speakers. Stevie Ray Vaughan filled the room, so we assumed the floorstanders were channelling him. "Oh no, you're listening to <I>those</I>."
Too Much Fun
"Basically, we're just having too much fun," Conrad-Johnson's Lew Johnson told me. "We're introducing three new state-of-the-art products. Well, the ART Series 3 is more new and improved.
Door Number Two
Lew Johnson pointed at the LP275M ($12,500). "This is something CJ hasn't done in a while: a high output tube monoblock. We use four pairs of 6550s to obtain 275W with our proprietary translinear transformers. We can configure it for 2, 4, 8, or 16 Ohm loads (standard is 4 Ohm). Like our most recent designs, we're using metal foil resistors and Teflon CJD capacitors. We'll be shipping them by February."