AudioAficionado.org - CES 2011 - Day One (Venetian) Pics & Thoughts...

This covers some of the key rooms (sans Mac - which Ivan already ninja'd in).

Items of lackluster performance: Magico (as usual), SF (as usual, though the speakers are very pretty), and surprisingly, much of the Wilson rooms - and there were tons of Wilson Sasha/Sofia's all over the place. Some sounded great - some were just horrific - I blame the electronics and source material behind them. The A2's with LAMM (retail of the whole set up was ~680,000$USD) required a long sit-down. The first material the host played for someone was an opera, horridly recorded, and sounded flat. My first thought was "what was all the hype of WA + LAMM - it sounds like crap...!" However, after opening my ears up, I realized the recording was of such poor quality and the system was so freaking accurate that I would just have to bite my tongue and wait for the next material. As the host changed do a different genre and to a far superior recording, the depth and breadth of what LAMM+A2's can do started to open up. A huge sigh of relief - to say the least.

Probably one of the "biggest" splashes is the new Boulder amps - and these things will be boulders when they are completed - around ~400 lbs each, $180k for the pair, and hand-machined as a mirror image of each other (they are left/right designated - not just a pair of the same amps). They are gorgeous - the lines are gorgeous - the concept is delicious. However, the price tag for 1500W and requiring 2x 240V 35a lines becomes hard to swallow, unless they are just that good once they get ready by the summer time.

Of other notable mention is a new company called Surrountec - very nice people trying to get a foothold in the US market. However those huge white self-powered speakers, while having a nice bass extension, lacked a lot of the image and clarity you wanted in the mid and upper range - especially for a 100k Euro speaker.

The winner of the Venetian - IMHO, is T&A. This new company had a full range of products, but the ones that caught my attention was their flagship speakers (pictured) along with a Tube input/SS output hybrid amp, and all tube source components. It sounded absolutely amazing. The image and bass response from these speakers and components rivaled the finest systems at the show - and at a significantly lesser price point (the flagship floorstanders were ~$45k/pr). Highly recommended to check this company of products out if you are finding yourself in the market for any new major components.

To round things out - one of the coolest little items was Cary's new universal player. It is awesome. It destroys anything else out there just from the feature set it contains. And it's so simple. The remote has selectable sampling rates. So you can manually adjust the sampling rate of any source material you feed it - a feature I have been craving for some time, Cary is the first and only to do. They get major kudos for that.

Last, but not least - WireWorld. As always - the absolute best people to deal with. That - and a new Silver & Platinum line of USB cables. Yep - the era of WW USB is upon us, and I bet they will rock out and destroy much like the rest of their product line. As I've learned just from a simple USB DAC setup in my office - not all USB cables are created equally - so hopefully this line will pick up steam as the USB DAC & high-end USB input market becomes more saturated.

Until tomorrow... Dinner with the big man tonight - so I'm sure we've got a lot of stuff to catch up on! :D