CES 2006 and the parallel slow run from January 5-8, with a special press day on the 4th (Day Zero, we call it). Click to visit each of UHF's live reports. The report will appear early the next day, if not before.

CES Preview

Day 0 (Jan.4th)

Day 1 (Jan.5th)

Day 2 (Jan.6th)

Day 3 (Jan.7th)

Day 4 (Jan.8th)

     The official venue for high end audio at CES is the Alexis Park complex on Harmon street. But next door to Alexis Park is the St. Tropez, home to The Home Entertainment Show, an independent high end show which, by an incredible coincidence ("incredible" takes on its true sense here) runs the same days.
     For some reason, the show hived a number of "international" (Asian) companies into the same building. A Hong Kong company called Audio Space was showing a bewildering variety of gear, most it using tubes, which was stacked rather than displayed. The room included the JAS Orior speaker, a large bookshelf unit with a slanted front, a cermaic woofer and a ribbon tweeter. The two reps tried to demonstrate a tabletop system that works with an iPod...but then realized they didn’t know how the iPod works! They could be among the last in the world.
     Art Audio was there with a prototype of its new Vivo stereo tube power amplifier. At first we thought it was fitted with push-pull 300B tubes, with their retro light bulb look. In fact they are 320B’s, a higher voltage version from Tesla that yields 40 watts per channel (you can order a lower-powered 300B version if proprietary tubes make new nervous). Expect price: US$13K.
     The large and somewhat ungainly APL speaker sounded rather good, somewhat on the mellow side. We heard a familiar recording, the Ray Brown Trio’s Take the A Train from Soular Energy. This was an SACD version (we have a DVD-Audio and an LP version, which we use in equipment reviews). Nice, with a good bottom end, and well-placed instruments across the sound stage.
     We spent a few minutes at the room of Mørch, maker of a unipivot tone arm with an elegantly slim arm tube. This time Dr. Mørch was showing a prototype of a new arm, with two outrigger weights to increase the moment of inertia, making the arm less "tippy" laterally at higher frequencies. Projected price is just under US$5K. "It goes down below 20 Hz," said Dr. Mørch, pleased to be showing off an organ recording with some particularly chunky pipe work. The turntable the arm is mounted on is a Eurolab.
     A number of the loudspeakers we heard carried price tags that seemed almost caricatural, but an exception was the Zen Acoustic Adagio, which costs just $3700 (all right, we know you can’t just bend down and pick that up in the street, but we’re trying to keep things in perspective here). It’s a two-way transmission line speaker -- and there’s a principle we don’t see nearly enough of -- with great dynamics, especially on brass.
     The Alexis Park seemed to have a lot of turntables per square kilometer, and that was doubly true of T.H.E.Show. The most expensive was without a doubt the Australian-made Continuum. With a platter the weight of a large amp, floated magnetically, and with a purpose-built stand, also with a magnetic float, it tops out at $85K. Mind you, for that price the designer will come to your home and install it. No word on what happens if you move. Quite different is the Garrard 501 (shown at left), widely considered to be a classic (which some people pronounce o-b-s-o-l-e-t-e) from many years ago. The design was bought by Germany’s Loricraft, which also makes record cleaning machines.
     Loricraft was brandishing a German review claiming that no other turntable had lower rumble, including the legendary Linn LP12. Odd...considering that the 501 has an idler drive, not the ubiquitous belt drive. We would want to get a look at the test method...
     That wasn’t the only Garrard table we spotted. An original 301 was supplying sound to a pair of large speakers, the DeVore Fidelity Silverback Reference. They sounded good, though we would hazard a guess that they would sound even better with a modern turntable.
     Since the show no longer had displays at the San Remo, we wondered where they would put such companies as Halcro, with its giant amplifiers. Well, Halcro was in a small room, though its music played as though it were big. One of the only two available large rooms was occupied by Cabasse. You may recall that Cabasse has long used a mid-range tweeter combination mounted in a sphere that looked like an eye. Its newest protoype, La Sphère, actually places four drivers coaxially. The stand, as you can see at right, is made from recycled speaker baskets. But the final version will have its own more attractive stand, and will be some color other than bright white. It mostly sounded very good, though a powerful organ passage caused massive Doppler warbling, something you don’t expect from this large a speaker. One more thing to sort out, we can figure.
     Most startling product: a totally blinged out grand piano at the Bösendorfer room, covered with hundreds of Swarowski crystals. Of course Bösendorfer has branched out, watching piano sales sing slowly in the face of Asian competition, and now making loudspeakers. As at other shows, the demo was not set up to convince. Perhaps next time.
     A delicious little passive preamplifier was on show at the Audio Zone room. It uses transformers and 24-position switches, not the usual potentiometer. From the same Canadian company was an equally compact integrated amplifier, boasting the shortest signal path of any amplifier in the world (not the sort of thing we’re in a position to check out just at the moment). Accompanied by Omega single-driver speakers and a modified Esoteric universal player, the combination sounded rather pleasant. The trumpet of Wynton Marsalys swooped across the sound stage quite convincingly.
     The Japanese manufacturer Almarro was back. On its shelf was the little inexpensive tube amp we had commented on positively four years ago, but that was not what was playing. The A5070A, at right, is a nicely put together integrated amplifier. It costs a little over US$2000, depending on the finish. We liked the finish you see here, and we also liked what we heard through the M3A floorstanding three-way speakers.
     Among the imported products that were new to us was a pair of very tall ribbon speakers from Greece, the Analysis Audio. They are massive, rather too large for the hotel room they were in, but they did sound very fine, rather better than the old Apogees one visitor compared them to. They were driven with ease by Antique Sound Lab monoblocks. On a recording of the Fairfield Four vocal group, they showed a range of tones that other speakers might envy!
    After that, it was off to Canada Night, a party organized each year by Marketnews, a trade magazine for the Canadian consumer electronic industry. Nice buffet, and an ambience with a decibel level that makes casual conversation a challenge.
     And tomorrow we’re off to the "zoo," the huge complex that makes up the Las Vegas Convention Centre. If we’re not back by the next morning, send in the tracking dogs!

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