John Atkinson

As far as I can tell, Santa Fe&ndash;based speaker engineer <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/694">John Bau</A> had designed but four commercial loudspeakers before the TC-60 was launched at the 1994 Winter CES: in order of appearance, they were the Spica SC50i (1980), the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/446">TC-50</A&gt; (1983), the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/693">Angelus</A&gt; (1987), and the SC-30 (1989). None were expensive, and all garnered much praise, both in <I>Stereophile</I>'s pages and elsewhere.

The first time I attended the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, in January 1986, I didn't get there until the second day of the Show. Still, by the beginning of the fourth and final day I'd managed to visit every high-end audio exhibit, and still had time to go back for seconds to the rooms that had sounded the best. Twenty years later, CES has grown so much that it's impossible for a single writer to visit even a quarter of the exhibits in which he might be interested. And even with the sort of <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/">team reporting</A> <I>Stereophile</I> now practices, covering the Show has become an exercise in applied logistics for the busy journalist: "Should I wait for the free shuttle bus? Should I get a taxi&mdash;though I might get caught in Las Vegas's increasing traffic jams, or even just get stuck at the city's interminable traffic lights? Or should I take the new monorail&mdash;though that goes nowhere near the hotel in which [<I>insert name of hot company</I>] is demming its products?"

Canadian speaker company PSB has majored in high-performance affordable speakers, with its tiny <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/792psb">Alpha</A&gt;, introduced in 1992, becoming on of the best-selling speakers of all time. Designer Paul Barton (above), however, has been working on a flagship PSB speaker, which he demmed at the Lenbrook suite at the Hard Rock Hotel. Yet to be named, the new speaker will cost a still-affordable $4500/pair and spearheads a new line of six models to be introduced in the second quarter this year.

You'd think there was not much more to say when it came to horn speaker design. Yet there, in one of the Venetian's 29th-floor rooms was audible proof that progress can still be made. Designed by Japanese engineer Tetsuo Kubo (above), the <A HREF="http://www.kubotek.com">Kubotek</A&gt; Haniwa SP1W33 horn speakers ($60,000/pair) use Electrovoice drivers loaded with midrange and low-frequency horns that continue the Tractrix flare around to the rear of the horn to minimize edge reflections. A separate DSP processor, the FPIC-100 Sound Signal Controller is used to correct the horns' phase characteristics independent of the amplitude response.

You'd think there was not much more to say when it came to horn speaker design. Yet there, in one of the Venetian's 29th-floor rooms was audible proof that progress can still be made. Designed by Japanese engineer Tetsuo Kubo (above), the <A HREF="http://www.kubotek.com">Kubotek</A&gt; Haniwa SP1W33 horn speakers ($60,000/pair) use Electrovoice drivers loaded with midrange and low-frequency horns that continue the Tractrix flare around to the rear of the horn to minimize edge reflections. A separate DSP processor, the FPIC-100 Sound Signal Controller is used to correct the horns' phase characteristics independent of the amplitude response.

I fell in love with the sound of the unique omnidirectional mbl tweeter when I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/643/">reviewed</A&gt; mbl 111 loudspeaker in August 2002, so I always treat my ears by visiting the Berlin company's room the last morning of a Show. At the 2007 CES, they were showing <I>this</I>: an assault on the state of the speaker art based on two the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1004mbl/">mbl 101E</A>'s upper-frequency modules mounted on top of one another, with separate active woofer towers. The excess of glass in the hotel suite led to a rather uptilted high-treble balanced, but the presentation was as awesome aurally as it was visually.

I looked into the Cary Audio Design room in the Venetian Towers to catch up with designer Dennis Had to find out what the North Carolina company had been up to since I visited them a year ago. But he was out, so I settled back to enjoy some fine music on Dynaudio Confidence C4 speakers&mdash;favorites of mine since I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/794/">reviewed them</A> in September 2003&mdash;driven by the 10th-Anniversary Edition of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/740/">Cary's CAD805</A> single-ended triode monoblock, perhaps the finest-sounding of its breed. Source was the CAD-306 SACD player, back in production after some manufacturing problems with its Sony-sourced chipset. Nice. Very nice.