T.H.E. Show 2021

Nothing has changed with Spatial Audio's M3 loudspeaker ($4950/pair) since the last time I heard it. The design is the same, as is the speakers' ability to totally disappear at very close range.

There was something for everyone in Sunil Merchant's Sunny Components room. Even if you didn't have a spare half million dollars to give for great music reproduction, you could still listen to MoFi's Lenny Mayeux spin vinyl on the Brinkmann Taurus turntable with 12.1 tonearm ($21,000) and Koetsu cartridge ($3995). Amplification was a CH Precision M 1.1 Amplifier ($54,000), L1 line preamplifier ($34,500), P1 phono stage ($31,000), and X1 dual power supply powering the P1 and L1. And if you had questions afterwards, you could always approach Merchant, Mayeux, or CH's Ralph Sorrentino.

It's been a long time coming, but it is finally happening. As I write these words, T.H.E. Show (aka The Home Entertainment Show), the successor to the late Richard Beers' original T.H.E. Show that began as an alternative high-end showplace to CES, is about to begin in the Long Beach Hilton. (That's Long Beach, California, for the uninitiated.) Dealers and exhibitors have set up in 20 or so rooms and numerous marketplace booths, said their prayers, enjoyed dinner in the hotel or in downtown Long Beach, and begun to burrow in for the night. As they do, components cook, cables settle, and the acoustic gods and karmic gatekeepers prepare to hold their traditional midnight meeting of the minds to decide each exhibitor's fate.

After a 15-year hiatus, Italy's Zingali Acoustics returns to the US courtesy of importer/distributor Reference Components Ltd with the Twenty 1.2 EVO Thirtieth Anniversary Edition loudspeakers ($21,045/pair in walnut finish). To these ears, the re-introduction is notable, because Hilary Hahn's violin sounded glorious on her performance of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No.1. Sweetened by Cary Audio's 27Wpc CAD-805 RS single-ended triode monoblocks ($15,995/pair) with a host of new, old, and NOS tubes and a Cary SLP-98P preamplifier ($4995) with Tung Sol tubes from the 1940s, the sound was magical.

I almost lost my hearing in the PBN room. Well, not quite the room itself. I was approaching the large entranceway to this huge air-walled PBN room on the ground floor when my guardian angels, somewhat like the guardians of the temple in Mozart's The Magic Flute, declared "Zurück! This music is too loud for you to enter."

Rick Schulz's High Fidelity Cables system threw such a huge soundstage that I needed to go back a row or two to take it all in. When I did, it sounded tremendous, as in positively three-dimensional with a smooth and pleasing top.

In this moderately priced system, speaker designer and recording engineer Tony Minasian paired his new Oriaco G6 standmount loudspeaker ($3500/pair with stands) with Denon and Marantz gear. "Most of the sound comes from the full-range driver," he told me. "The tweeter mostly acts like a supertweeter." From what I could tell, its impact is major.