CES 2010 - Day One PICS

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Morning gents,

CES Day one, from the Venetian.

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And as always .................................................. ..................Dinner & Dessert.

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A small review and write-up:

I finally was able to experience the Magico speaker product line. Their arrogance aside, the speaker was probably one of the most revealing, neutral, soothing speaker I have heard in a long time. The $54,000 price tag is well earned for the quality of the construction and the performance of the speaker. Unfortunately I was unable to demo the system with my own material, and their material.... lacked in many ways.

Second on the list and probably the best demo was the Boulder products with the JM Lab Maestro Utopias. (I think they were Maestro's at least) The salesman and chief engineer were very accomodating, fun, and respectful. It made me want to buy Boulder products in the same way I like to buy Wireworld items - when you put a face, name, and attitude to a product line you get a bit more bias. However, the match of Boulder (which is immensely powerful and had total control over those JM Lab's) and JM was fantastic, and was one of the best sounding rooms in the Venetian. Boulder's new CD player is amazing, has ethernet connectivity and an iPhone app to feed music to its DAC from any type of NAS, and the OSD makes things very easy to read. Oh, their remote controls are about as heavy as a volkswagen - truly fine quality and build.

The MBL room did not disappoint. All MBL, with their new DAC which will eventually take a feed from S/PDIF, AES/EBU, or TOSlink up to 24/192+. Even the MBL DAC has a USB input on its current model........... Regardless, the entire room oozed superb quality, a really clean yet non-harsh sound, and thorough control and transparency from their two-channel setup; in other words, a feat considering where they had to set up the system.

Our friends at Meridian, as always, showed the newest version of SoolooS, and I was able to chat with the founder of the product for awhile. What is coming out soon, matched with them supposedly fixing their earlier supply chain issues should prove to be a wonderful one-stop solution for multi-zone and easy-to-use music playing.

The area of disappointment was the SF demo room. It was huge, they sounded great, but played absolutely horrid music that the demo "runner" kept repeating. One track, over and over, with the same schpeal of just how great the track was. That combined with an inappropriate level of arrogance was a turn off for such a wonderful speaker and 6 REL subs stacked in 3's behind each main.

I was finally able to meet David from Wireworld, did a little Ivan name dropping (they love you, of course, Ivan). Both folks from WW were extremely nice, and I finally got to touch some of the new platinum line items - even if just to get a sense of the rediculuously high level of build quality.

That about sums up day one. More to come probably tomorrow. Cheers

[Still-One]

Vesuvius
Thanks for the photos and write up.
I am really looking forward to hearing the new Q speakers. .I have also been a fan of the Focal line but when I was able to listen to the Maestros with Jerry in Singapore I was underwhelmed but that could have been due to the GamuT amplification. Also I had just spent time listening to the MBL and YG/Pass systems.

I am still trying to figure out if and when I should pop for the 111e MkII's. I really don't want to move my gear to a larger room.

[klipschfan]

Great photos-Thanks!

Wonder what it costs to re-tube the Audio Research mono blocks-might be more expensive than dessert...

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I gave the new YG stuff a listen yesterday as well. They had the most extravagant room as far as sound dampening goes, and even with all of that - I'll take a line from you: I was underwhelmed. They were overly thick and forward, like a congested speaker that really needs to sneeze some stuff out.

[vintage_tube]

Thanks for the writeup & pictures --keep them coming.

Just spoke to my dealer who is attending and stated the Q5's were down right astounding and sounded "so correct." Build quality as shown by the display piece was unbelieveable.

He said the large Hansens that "look like large ketchup bottles" were horrible.

The SF room with the triple REL subs was not like the experience you had - playing classical music when he visited & thought afterwards when the music ended, "that everyone was on the verge of clapping."

The Eggleston Works room with the larger Savoys sounded exceptional enough to warrant a return trip.

He is attempting to visit as many rooms as possible and mark down which ones he wants to revisit for a longer duration -- with sooooo many rooms, 10 minutes or so per room, he said it would take 2 weeks to see it all.

He stated alot of the rooms are running to his surprise Kubala Sona cabling --more than he expected.

[Dj_AmTraX]

WOW! I wish I was there. Keep it coming. Thank you!

[MC352]

Thanks for the photo updates and the review. I wish I was there also.