CES 2009

Credit where credit is due: Here's the man himself, Lars Engstrom, standing with theLARS.

"We are your one-stop shop for cables and tweaks," proclaimed Joseph Cohen of The Lotus Group, while leading me through two rooms filled products. Even the new products took up two pages of notes. Through it all, I remained extremely jealous of legendary mastering engineer Steve Hoffman, who had settled onto a couch in front of the fabulous Feastrex $55,000/pair speakers, and was blissfully tapping his foot to the extremely realistic, full-range sound of a jazz combo playing back on a A Feastrex modified EMT studio type CD player with outboard line transformer.

Taking pride of place in distributor Sumiko's suite on the Venetian's 35th floor were the new Vienna Acoustics Kiss loudspeaker ($15,000/pair). Part of the company's Klimt series, the Kiss is ostensibly a stand-mounted design, but the side-pillared, faintly convex stand is part of the design concept. One drive-unit—the flat, radially ribbed unit first seen in the Vienna Musik, covers the entire range of the human voice, 120Hz–2.6kHz, and is married to a tweeter in its center and a port-loaded woofer. The latter features the ribbed, transparent polymer cone material used in Vienna's line, but has a multiple-radius cone profile to maximize stiffness and minimize mass.

One of the most impressive speakers I have auditioned in the past few years was the three-way Aerial 20T, which was reviewed">http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/404aerial/">reviewed by Michael Fremer in April 2004. I spoke to Aerial's Michael Kelly a while back about getting a pair for a Follow-Up review, but he declined, saying that he was working on an improved version.

All the wire used in DH Labs's products is manufactured in the USA; cables are manufactured in the same facility that manufactures for NASA. At least 11 major recording studios use the company's cables, and others will soon join the list. This, along with the nice sound albeit not ultimately detailed sound they were getting from their modest display system certainly suggests that they're doing something right.

For those for whom the mere mention of the price of a Tenor Audio amp sends their voice into the soprano range, PrimaLuna's multi-tiered line of triode amplification may help them descend to earth.

Between 150 and 200 producers of cables and components rely on WBT for their terminations and connectors. Hence, any advance in their line has profound implications for audiophiles. This year, WBT was touting its Nextgen terminations. Composed of either pure copper or fine silver, Nextgen connectors s boast less mass than other WBT terminations, and are claimed to yield superior sound.