The Audiophiliac

Over at Dvice, my buddy Michael Trei was floored by the sounds at the Vandersteen room at the Consumer Electronics show last week in Las Vegas. The company debuted its new Model Seven speakers in a $300,000 system while spinning LPs.

Richard Vandersteen told me about these new speakers last year, when he was still perfecting his balsa wood/carbon fiber "sandwich" material for tweeters and woofer drivers. It's super lightweight, which enables the driver to keep up with the music's ever changing signals better than more conventional materials, yet it's so strong, you can actually stand on a balsa/carbon cone without damaging it.

Building each driver is, at least for now, a labor-intensive process, so the Model Seven is considerably more expensive than Vandersteen's bread-and-butter models (prices start around $785 a pair. The Model Seven will sell for $45,000 a pair. Vandersteen speakers are manufactured in Hanford, Calif.

... Read more

Anthony Gallo Acoustics never made box speakers.

No, Gallo speakers, from the company's earliest days in 1994, were always designed around spherical cabinets. Yes, others have followed suit, but Gallo was the first to perfect round sound.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which opens Thursday in Las Vegas, Gallo will premiere its latest speaker: the double-balled Strada ($1,000 MSRP each). Measuring a compact 6.5 inches tall by 12.5 inches wide by 5.5 inches deep, the Strada is jam-packed with unique technology.

Round speakers are no cosmetic gimmick; round speakers get around the inherent structural and acoustic problems of boxes, which, to a greater or lesser degree, always adversely affect the speakers' sound. Boxes tend to "sing along" with the drivers, smearing the sound. Gallo's hardened-steel balls are so incredibly rigid that all you hear is the sound of the Stradas' woofer and tweeter.

The thing is, small speaker cabinets tend to severely limit bass power and low-frequency oomph. So sure, the Strada would suffer from undernourished bass if it weren't endowed with Gallo's patented S2 Technology. Here's how it works: the balls are packed with polyolefin flakes (they look like snow flakes) that absorb significantly more energy than commonly used wool or synthetic stuffing materials.

The polyolefin flakes' denser-than-air mass also replicates the volume of a much larger enclosure, which allows the Strada's woofers to produce deeper bass, and the flakes minimize performance-degrading reflections within the speaker itself. The Strada makes enough bass on its own that there's no need to add a subwoofer for stereo applications, Gallo claims.

Nestled between the Strada spheres you'll find the latest update of Gallo's proprietary CDT 3 tweeter. Instead of the usual dome tweeter, Gallo's tweeter is a silver-coated cylinder boasting vastly greater radiating area than conventional tweeters. Gallo's tweeter forgoes most of the moving mass elements common to dome tweeters--a voice coil, coil-former, or a suspension--and maybe that's why it produces high-frequency response extending all the way up to 50 kilohertz (dome tweeters barely make it past 20KHz). The tweeter is another reason Gallos sound better than conventional speakers.

The company is also introducing a matching subwoofer, the TR-3 ($984 MSRP). It nixes the usual boring cube shape in favor of a cylinder. It's a little thing--just 10.75 inches tall by 12 inches wide by 13.5 inches deep--but since it also uses S2 Technology it delivers deeper and more powerful bass than other minisubs.

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2008 was held at two hotels: the Denver Marriott Tech Center Hotel and the Hyatt Regency Tech Center on October 10 through October 12, 2008.

UPDATE: Click here to view more pictures from the RMAF.

The hundreds of manufacturers participating at the show proves high-end audio is alive and definitely kicking. RMAF has a very different vibe than the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January--RMAF is friendlier, without a hint of corporate oppression that dominates mainstream shows.

High-end audio is a smaller industry, where established brands such as Krell and Vandersteen compete against fledgling start-ups. Every manufacturer sets out to build the very best performing products, without the dulling constraints that Sony or Bose has to contend with.

Cruising through the 160 demo rooms I noticed an interesting trend, a minority of companies were using CD players. Maybe half had music servers/laptops, 30 percent were spinning vinyl, a couple had reel-to-reel analog tape machines, and the remainder was CD based.

Jolida's new $399 JT-10 all-tube integrated amplifier sounded awesome. It's a gorgeous glass encased design, a little jewel of an amp. Jolida also showed the JD 9 tube phono preamplifier, which was also sounding phenomenal. I believe it's $450, what a deal!

Vacuum tube electronics were plentiful, perhaps even in the majority compared with solid-state. Sure, a lot of gear was pricey, but budget high-end brands, such as Audioengine were making great sound on the cheap, the Audioengine 2 speakers run $200 a pair. Clever name, the Audiophile One is a tiny, $249, 30 watts per channel stereo amplifier. It's no toy, the little thing comes in a bunch of colors and it's built to a very high standard.

... Read more

Forget Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD, thanks to YouTube you can check out what the experts at the Consumer Electronics Show were saying about the original video format war, Beta vs VHS tape, way back in 1981. Oh, and there's a tantalizing glimpse of the "future," RCA's new video format, the SelectaVision VideoDisc. (Full video after the jump.)

... Read more

Stereophile magazine's excellent coverage of the high-end audio scene at CES '08 at the Venetian Hotel has kept me on the edge of my seat since Monday. So many great new products, from old and new companies say a lot about the thriving, worldwide audiophile market. I've picked five products to show you, but Stereophile's site has dozens of really cool sightings.

Anthony Gallo Acoustics (AGA) is displaying its all-new Reference 5LS line source loudspeaker at CES '08. The towering speaker stands 78-inches tall, boasts twelve aluminum 4-inch woofers, seven cylindrical tweeters, and eight 4-inch carbon-fiber midrange drivers, each housed it its own 5-inch spherical enclosure. The brushed stainless steel design is a knockout. I have heard the 5LS and think it'll likely become an audiophile classic (I have a review coming in a future issue of Home Entertainment magazine). The 5LS projects a gigantic, life-size sound. Yes friends, size still matters.

This loudspeaker is the culmination of more than 25 years of loudspeaker design research by Anthony Gallo. The 5LS offers options for bi- or tri-wiring, as well as bi- or tri-amping. The combined surface area of the twelve 4-inch rear-firing woofers nearly equal the surface area of a 15-inch subwoofer, while offering the speed and transparency a large single driver cannot match. AGA offers an optional Reference SA amplifier to drive the woofers. The amp allows the speaker to be positioned for optimal imaging and soundstaging without compromising bass performance.

While the mid-fi brands scramble to load on the latest techno gizmos and race to the bottom with ever cheaper prices and quality, high-end audio brands shoot for the moon. Take Loiminchay Audio, manufacturers of limited-edition speakers for well-heeled audiophiles are introducing their wares at CES in Las Vegas today.

The Loiminchay Audio speakers are artisan-crafted from sensually shaped layers of solid Birch MultiPly. The interior space of each speaker is machined out, the driver holes opened, and substantial bracing added, resulting in a tremendously non-resonant driver support structure. The speaker is then finished with sixteen coats of lacquer--Loiminchay's three models are named after great painters--Degas and Chagall and Kandinsky. The speakers are designed in New York by Loiminchay's owner Patrick Chu, and built in China.

The Chagall's cabinet mounts an 8-inch woofer in a 1-inch thick concrete board wrapped with high-quality leather to produce a remarkably rigid, non-resonant driver platform. The woofer's bass extends down to 28Hz, and the speaker's treble reaches up to a remarkable 50kHz with its optional diamond tweeter (yes real diamonds, chosen because diamonds are harder and therefore immune to the flexing of more common plastic and metal tweeter dome materials).

The Chagall is available on order in beautiful MultiClear lacquer finish at $35,000/pr, and in a piano lacquer finish for $40,000/pr. The Chagall equipped with the Diamond Tweeter is $48,500 in clear, and $53,500 in piano lacquer finish.

Today in Las Vegas, Burmester Audiosysteme, Germany's legendary manufacturer of ultra high-performance electronics and speakers, is exhibiting its 069 Reference Line CD Player. This amazing machine draws oohs and aahs even before it makes a sound, it's that gorgeous.

The 069 CD Player is a cutting-edge digital playback system, created for well heeled connoisseurs of music and German industrial design. Its audiophile credentials come in the form of its proprietary belt drive motor system that spins the CDs (instead of the off-the-shelf direct-drive mechanisms other manufacturers use).

The 069 CD Player's spiked feet may be set directly on the its proprietary aluminum base (supplied as standard with the unit), and it uses special carbon-fiber spring pucks to isolate the sensitive electronics from external interference. The player also boasts newly developed and 96 and 192-kHz oscillators with minimal phase noise and high thermal stability. Burmester's 069 Reference Line CD Player is available with a silver housing with a chrome front panel at a suggested price of, whoa, $49,995!