CES 2009 and the parallel show run from January 8-11th, with a special press day on the 7th (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.7th)

Day 1 (Jan.8th)

Day 2 (Jan.9th)

Day 3 (Jan.10th)

Day 4 (Jan.11th)

     Peter Ledermann, the Soundsmith, was playing LPs (including the LP version of Love, from the Cirque du Soleil show of that title) with the new generation of his strain gauge phono cartridge. Of course he had his usual panoply of wood-faced audio components along. For once, though, he had brought someone else's speaker, from Green Mountain (shown at left). Its sound was warm, comforting and downright lovely. Hearing the same music (A Day in the Life from the Love album) through Soundsmith's much smaller Monarch speaker gave less of an impression of warmth, but the dynamics seemed so extended they got downright scary!
     Roger Sanders, the electrostatic speaker designer who was the subject of a Rendezvous article in our pages a little over a year ago, was back with his new model 10b electrostat/dynamic hybrids. They were driven by Sanders' own electronics. Only the source, a Tascam flash memory recorder, was not his own. Panel speakers are not noted for great depth, of course, whatever their technology, but the 10b's put up a superb, stable image, and the music was fast and detailed, as well as natural.
     Divergent Technologies had of course brought its Reference 3a speakers, and we finally go to hear the Episodes properly (at the Montreal show one of them had been damaged by a thumb placed just at tweeter height). Very nice. Michael Chang was present not only with his very good Chang Lightspeed power filters but with the prototype of his new tube preamplifier. Housed in an unfinished wooden case for now (perforated, happily), with a tube rectifier and voltage regulator, it has a single tube for gain. Along with a Copland CD player and ASL Monsoon tube monoblocks driving Reference 3a MM De Capos, it sounded most promising, with particularly quick and natural transients. The target price for the as-yet unnamed preamp is in the order of $7000, though of course the design is not yet complete.
     Have you heard of Clarity Cables? It makes cables of course, but also power filters and little pillows to go atop your gear. The sign at right grabbed our attention.
     The company has a provocative premise: buy low-cost components, and make them sound better by putting your money into Clarity products. The system demonstrated consisted of a Panasonic Blu-ray player and receiver, and a pair of (shudder!) Infinity Beta loudspeakers. Total cost was well under $2000, but the various Clarity products brought the cost closer to $10,000. Does that make sense?
     Well, you be the judge, if you get the chance. In fact Clarity must make okay products, because the system sounded way better than you would expect from the ill-chosen components. The important question is this, however: did it now sound like a $10,000 system? Our view: in your dreams!
     Also provocative, as always, was NFS Audio, whose listening room was mightily enhanced by sets of BlissLights.
     In the past NFS has been known to play 8-track tapes (and it had in fact hoped to bring an Elcaset player to the show). This time the source was a SOTA turntable, backed by many hundreds of LPs, but plugged into an aged Yamaha receiver. The speakers were an obscure brand from 1992, though the cables (are you listening, Clarity?) were of audiophile grade. The perception was aided by craft-brewed beer.
     NFS, by the way, means "not for sale," reflecting the fact that the fictitious company (actually a group of Vegas audiophiles) aren't pushing anything. "We've made zero profits over the past year," said one of the joyous band, "and that puts us ahead of half the companies in this industry."
     One of the interesting rooms was that of Wavac Audio Lab, whose tube monoblocks and new PR-Z1 preamp were driving Venture speakers with a full array of ceramic drivers. The source was Ed Meitner's emmLabs player. The sound was very tight and detailed, but with no excess.
     We got to hear our own iPod at the Studio Electric room. The company's new hybrid power amplifier (that is, tube gain stages, solid state power output) and T3 loudspeakers, one of which is shown at right, were connected to a Sony pro CD transport and a Benchmark converter, which also acted as a preamplifier. After we listened to a couple of CDs, we were invited to plug our iPod touch into the Wadya iTransport. We selected a song from Bïa's wonderful Sources album. The sound was warm and smooth, though with a lot more emphasis on the bottom end than we are used to hearing. It wasn't unplasant, but if it had been our system we would have done some serious tweaking, and we would probably have repositioned the speakers away from the rear wall. Such tweaking is not, however, the privilege of a visitor.
     We heard a very nice demo over at Edge. The company is best-knwn for its dramatically-styled power amplifiers, but this time it was featuring a new CD player with an unusual option: you can decide whose transport you want (the player we heard had a Toshiba transport). Even more unusual is that the player is powered from a rechargeable battery like the ones on motorcycles.
      Also in the system was a prototype preamplifier with an external power supply.
     This will not be an economy preamp, though if ou are familiar with the Edge brand that goes pretty much without saying. Just the volume potentiometer, if you could buy it by itself, would set you back $4500. Do you want to know the total damages? Oh all right, if you insist, the bill comes to $58,500. plus tax and tip.
     That isn't all of course. There's the power amp, alsy by Edge, and the huge PDN Montana WAS2 loudspeakers (the "WA" is rumored to stand for "whupp ass"). A recording of Tibetan monks chanting and playing instruments, including a hellish big drum, was most interesting.
     Two more interesting pictures.
     The tube amplifier is an Artemis Labs SP1, and at first we were puzzled by the fact there were two of them with the same model number. It turns out that one is the power supply of the other. The single-sided amp sounded excellent, with some of the credit going to the mostly-wood turntable with a Schröder tone arm. The speakers were the new Verity Audio Thins (which are not truly thin, though they are certainly smaller than other Verity speakers).
     The huge speaker at right is from Scotland: the Deco 20 Signatures from Art Speaker. They were matched to unfamiliar tube electronics and a borrowed German CD player. The price: 22,500 Euros. There was some confusion on string passages, and we suspect the player.
     Having pretty much exhausted T.H.E. Show, we headed back t the Venetian for a special demo of high-resolution audio by two masters of the genre.
     One of the masters is Keith O. Johnson, the genius behind Reference Recordings and so many other products. Keith's master recordings were once all analog, but are now recorded digitally in the HRx format. You can now buy downloadable copies of the HRx files from Reference, but where was the player that could handle them?
     The other partner is Paul McGowan of PS Audio, who -- with a little help from his friends, as Paul McCartney would say -- developed the first HRx player, able to deliver 24 bit sound with a 176 kHz sampling rate, with no oversampling.
     We heard a demo of the HRx version of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Suites, and there was no denying the superiority of HRx over Red Book audio, with or without HDCD decoding. The sound was vast, with great depth and natural timbres.
     We need to add that this was indeed a demo. The player was able to buffer a limited amount of data, and so it is not a commercial product. But it will come, and audio sources have taken a major step forward. This may turn out to have been a historic event.
     Our picture shows McGowan (at left) chatting with Johnson at the demonstration.
     On Day 3, we will be visiting "the zoo," meaning the Las Vegas Convention Centre. That's where the video people are, among others. We'll also go to the Hilton tower, where several high end manufacturers have chosen to hang out.
     Expect the report late Saturday or early Sunday morning, depending on whether we can get by with the CES press facilities, or if we need to rely on our old friend, the Apple Store.
     Come along with us!
 

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