CES 2006

Sometime near">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/011006mothers/">near the close of Sunday, when vinyl was being slipped into sleeves and room treatments were coming down, I wandered my way to the end of a hall at the St. Tropez, where I heard such sweet music emanating from the LSA Group/DK Design suite.

Used by Bösendorfer in their demo, the Art Audio Adagio has to be one of the most beautiful tube amplifiers made. If you see it and don't want it, you have no soul.

During CES, I kept hearing about GamuT's luxury digs offsite way out in the suburbs beyond McCarran International Airport. "It's incredible," Stephen Mejias assured me. "It has a pool, a pool table, beautiful kitchen, and a Danish chef who will make anything you want." That sounded nice, but Stereophile's busy show-blogging schedule prevented me from partaking of that particular pleasure dome. "No problem," Lars Goller assured me. "We keep the house until Tuesday. Come by on Monday after the show and we'll spend as much time as you want bringing you up to speed."

Andrew and Lukas Lipinski, manufacturers of the L-707 monitor I reviewed">http://stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/1205lipinski/">reviewed in December, were fed up with poor room acoustics and slow foot traffic at trade shows. So they eliminated the room! Ray Kimber urged them to take the empty spot in the Alexis Park lunchroom for their demo setup. Andrew set up one of the few multi-channel demo systems at the Show using six L-707s, including the one for rear height information seen in the photo. Despite the din of the lunch crowd, all I had to do was sit in the nearfield, and I was bathed in sound from Andrew's multi-channel recordings, such as his new Republique SACD. For the photo, however, they kicked back with Telarc's recording of Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing "Diamonds in the Soles of Her Shoes." It definitely rocked the lunchroom!

This is Vegas, so you'll understand that when I say that Jon Iverson and I were simply rolling the dice when we entered Audiona's room at T.H.E. Show, I mean that in a good way. "Want to hear some actively crossovered, four-way loudspeakers?" Brian Quick asked us. Well, yeah, that's what we do.

Jon Iverson and I walked into Studio Electric's room at T.H.E. Show not knowing what to expect and stopped short. Whoa, this was different.

Technical Audio Devices, better known as TAD, was showing a speaker that looked disturbingly familiar. It was the same size and seemed to feature the same drivers as TAD's Model-1, but it lacked that speaker's silver hood and upper front baffle. That's because Andrew Jones had come to Vegas with TAD's Model-2, which he said would come in between $35,000 and $40,000/pair.