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.
Day 0 (Jan.7th)
Day 1 (Jan.8th)
Day 2 (Jan.9th)
Day 3 (Jan.10th)
Day 4 (Jan.11th)
What to do on the last day of the show? It's back to the Venetian, for a final look at the high end goodies.
And what are these two lovers listening to? These unusual speakers, which apear to have their bottom sections surgically removed, are appropriately called "The Kiss." Seriously. They are from Vienna Acoustics (not to be confused with Viennese Acoustics). The three-way design has only the midrange driver covering the range of frequencies of the human voice, to avoid placing a crossover point where it will do the most harm. They cost serious money, some $15,000, but they are seriously good too, and our two lovers, perhaps influenced by the music as much as the name, weren't eager to leave.
You really have to be up to a challenge if you bill your speakers as being "the best on earth, period." And it's even more of a challenge if you place them in the world's worst acoustics. We're not sure why Yg (that's the speaker's name) elected to set up in one of the divided ballrooms at the Venetian, but the speakers had to fight the room all the way. That they succeeded at all is a tribute to their design. We heard a couple of tracks from the remastered Jennifer Warnes CD of Famous Blue Raincoat, one with the white speakers, the other with the black ones. Truly excellent. The source was a dCS player, with Krell amplification.The enclosures are made from thick aircraft-grade aluminum, and the speakers are modular. The Anat Reference II, the black one, can be purchased in parts. You can have just the top section, whch is full range. You can add a subwoofer section, and you can add a second subwoofer section as well. If you do all of that, you'l have to be prepared to part with $107,000.
There were no major new speaker designs over at Thiel, which was also set up, along with Bryston, in one of those awful rooms. However Thiel was showing its evolving Zöet system (an agency came up with the name), in which each speaker has its own Internet address, and becomes part of a full-home system. The speakers cost $8000 a pair, but are of course self-powered. We listened to a rather impressive Dave Matthews concert Blu-ray through a full 5.1-channel Zöet system.
Totem was also in the acoustics-free zone, with an innovation that is mainly visual: brightly colored versions of its Wind speakers, like the red one at right. The Wind has received other changes too, including better decoupling and crossover changes. Totem was also demonstrating an in-wall version of its thin but surprisingly good Tribe speakers for home theatre.We spent a little time with the Adam Tensor speakers, which are fully active (and indeed its logo lights up). We recall the much larger Adam speakers from a spectacular home theatre demo two years ago. These are smaller but still dominate a room. The Tensor looks in a photos like a four-way speaker, but there is actually a fifth driver, a subwoofer, at the rear. Clearly you wouldn't put these up against the wall unless you were cruising for serious structural damage. Fed by a Classé CD player and preamp the Tensors sounded authoritative, with a fast, dry sound. The distortion was impressively low.
We also spent a few minutes listening to a very good organ recording through the Magico M5 speakers. The experience was...well, magical!
We were surprised to see the French speaker company Elipson attempting a return to the North American market. We actually own a pair of Elipson speakers, the diminutive 1400's, which are used for the rear channels in our home theatre system. As we recall the marque faded after it launched some mediocre speakers that were more lifestyle pieces than hi-fi products. The new speakers shown at CES are large, with an ambitious driver layout. The largest ones, the 42XX (the "XX" will be replaced by digits in the shipping version), rather overloaded the small room with Tchaikovsky's warhorse, the 1812 Overture. The impact of the cannon shots was surprising, however. We shall see what will come of the new models.
We heard a potentially interesting setup which included Eggleston speakers, Rogue's Hera preamp and large Apollo tube monoblocks and a Pathos player. There was an array of Echobuster room treatment panels at the rear, and their effect was odd. Our guess: there were also full-width drapes across the rear, a few centimetres out from the window, and the drapes and panels would have been absorbing the same frequencies. The result: a rather unnatural suckout of a whole frequency band. Those panels can be useful, but they can be too much of a good thing.
We spent entirely too much time at the Ocean Way room, with its gigantic pro monitors. Now we don't usually pay much attention to pro monitors, which are designed to a purpose different from ours, but these were an exception. Ocean Way is a famous Hollywood recording studio owned by Allen Sides. A lot of stars have recorded there, and indeed Sides has even engineered some well-regarded audiophile recordings. Example: Victor Feldman's Secret of the Andes, which we always include in loudspeaker tests because of its vast variety of percussion instruments (originally on a Nautilus direct-cut disc, it is now found on Audiophile on the JVC label).Sides had brought a whole set of his recordings, played eiher digitally or from his Ampex ATR-100 analog recorder. To ad to the fun, also present was Kevin Hayes of VAC, who had brought material of his own, two-channel mixdowns of the original three-channel masters of Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. Sides and Hayes got into an interesting discussion of microphone models (Ocean Way has hundreds of them).
We wondered, however, why Allen Sides had come to Vegas with his gigantic monitors and his custom electronics. He told us that, by the fourth day, he had already lined up ten potential customers, who found the speakers' $38,000 price cheap alongside the amounts asked for typical large audiophile speakers. He declared that if half the sales panned out, the trip would have been worthwhile.
Of course we're always looking for speakers of great transparency, and what is more transparent than glass? The French-made Waterfall speakers (its flagship, the Niagara, is at right) are made from surprisingly heavy glass. Not much can be hidden in that enclosure. The attractive vertical stripes along the rear are the internal wiring. The backs of the woofers are damped in stitched leather and foam.How did they sound? Potentially very good. "Potentially" because they were driven by NuForce class D amplifiers, whose identifiable sonic fingerprint was rendered transparently(!) by the Waterfalls. We would love to hear them under better circumstances.
Less spectacular but exciting in a different way, were the FC9 speakers from Focus Audio. They are floorstanding, with a gorgeous wood finish, and sounded smooth, with none of the common problems of low-cost speakers. But low-cost they are, at about $1800. A smaller version actually comes in at US$800.We've been talking about speakers, but there were turntables all over the place, more than ever before. Dynavector was showing its new 507 tone arm and its breathtaingly expensive XB1XT cartridge (some $9000, either US or Canadian, we're not sure). Along with Consonance electronics and B&C M12 speakers, the turntable was making serious music.
Oh yes, the turntable. It's the Well Tempered Amadeus, designed by turntable legend Bill Firebaugh, who was there to explain his unusual bearing design. Firebaugh has always argued that, since the belt pulls the platter sideways, you have to pay attention to the side of the bearing well, not just its bottom. Firebaugh has designed a square well, into which the round pivot fits, making what is in effect a zero-tolerance bearing.
The turntable playing of course had a Dynavector arm, but the one next to Bill Firebaugh in this photo includes his own Well Tempered tone arm. One of its major ingredients, which you can perhaps just make out in the photograph, is a golf ball. "I don't like to do what everyone else is doing," he says.There was a turntable we had not seen before, the German dps, over at the Ayre room. Ayre's connection is that it designed the three-phase power supply for the table. Along with Sonus Faber speakers and Ayre's own always superb electronics, they were an oasis of music amid...but let us not get crude.
The turntable, along with the power supply and a modified Rega RB250 arm, costs $10,000.
If there were a lot of turntables at the show, there were also a lot of iPods. Some surprisingly expensive gear now comes with an Pod dock.
The original high end iPod champion is MSB, known for its digital-to-analog converters. It still offers a dock for a specially-modified iPod, which can then feed a DAC such as MSB's own. The results were, as usual, convincing. The iPod, along with an MSB DAC III and Platinum M200 monoblocks, were making good music through large Harbeth speakers.But what are those M200 monoblocks anyway. That's one of them at right. They're from MSB itself, designed to allow critical comparisons of DACs. But they are now a commercial product, at $17,500 for a pair. They deliver 200 watts each, and they sure won't pass unnoticed.
And so ends another CES, possibly the most lightly-attended in years. Still, several exhibitors we talked to were perfectly satisfied with the show, and were happy they had come.
And that is of course essential for the very survival of CES. The impact of the economic slowdown will be flt more strongly next year. Many companies had already made their CES plans when the economy all but collapsed in the Fall, but they can certainly make different plans for 2010. Will they? You can be sure the accountants will be taking a hard look at the return on investment, in a period when every dollar counts.
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