2006 CES/T.H.E. Show - Part 2



From Asia With Love

In recent years there has been a steady parade Asian high-end audio products offering shockingly good value and sonics for very reasonable prices. Companies like Opera Audio (Consonance), April Music (Stello), and Usher Audio have made a profound impact on the U.S. audio scene which continued at this year’s show.

                               
Stephen Monte of NAT Distribution, the U.S. distributor of the excellent Opera Consonance line of electronics, had a large display where he showed off the latest products from Consonance. Consonance always presents an intriguing group of nicely built and seemingly under priced components. Adding to that legacy is the Droplet Amp 5.0 211-PP tube monoblocks amplifiers ($9,995/pr). It is hard to describe the looks of these amps so I’ll try this: they look like a cross between a giant kidney bean, a tube kit amp, and a Volkswagen Beetle. Okay, that was a bit of a stretch. The bottom line is that they’re a really cool looking amps, very much like their siblings the Droplet CDP 5.0 CD player and LP 5.0 turntable.


But the biggest eye catchers in the room were the new Forbidden City Series components. Sitting on a beautiful and ruggedly built stand were the Calaf ($3,200) 200W dual mono hybrid integrated amp and the Turandot ($2,400) CD player. Both components come in nicely finished brush silver aluminum chassis with bright red faceplates. If they sound as good as they look, Opera could have a huge hit on their hands.

April Music’s Stello line made a pretty big splash at last year’s show with a great and affordable product offering, many of which were reviewed on this website. New this year was a couple of diminutive products that offer scads of features and very nice sound for the money. The Stello HP100 headphone preamp ($595) comes with two sets of unbalanced inputs, an unbalanced output, and a Neutrik XLR headphone jack. The DA100 USB-24/192 DAC ($695) has coaxial, optical, and USB digital inputs and a set of unbalanced outputs. Both pieces come in rather unassuming looking black boxes but are still very sturdily built. They were put into action with a set of Sennheiser HD 650 headphones and along side a component from April Music’s higher-end product line, Eximus. The Eximus CD10 is a statement product for redbook-only CDs (is also able to play CD-RW) and has peerless build quality and finish. It uses a Philips Pro 2M transport and a 24/192 Delta-Sigma DAC. It offers two sets of analog outputs (balanced and unbalanced) and three sets of digital outs (AES/EBU, coaxial, and optical). Three digital inputs are available via coaxial, optical, and USB connections.

                            
Usher Audio was back with its much heralded Dancer II Series loudspeakers which now feature Beryllium drivers. The first of the Usher speakers I heard was actually in the NuForce room. The CP-8571 II ($7,735/pr) was being driven by the fabulous Reference Nines ($2,500/pr), the new P-8 preamp, and a Marantz SACD player. I listened to Brad Mehldau performing “Old Man” from the Space Cowboys soundtrack and thought that the sound was very musical but for some reason it didn’t seem to have the dynamics or deep bass clarity that I had heard on some of the other systems that day. This bothered me tremendously because I have heard both sound better in different systems. I went over to the Usher room the first thing the next morning and had Carter Tracht of Thee High End (Usher’s U.S. distributor) play that same song on the same speakers but this time the system included Usher’s own grossly underappreciated P307A preamp and R-1.5 power amp. The bass authority and musicality I loved was there leaving me believe that maybe I was just tired when I listened the night before. It had been a long day.

                          
Alfie Lew, President of Mountain View, CA-based Gini Systems, Inc., is bringing two dynamic new product lines to the U.S., tube electronics builder Audio Space and loudspeaker and tube amp maker JAS Audio. Both companies offer a gorgeous line of very affordable tube electronics and speakers. One of the most exciting looking speakers at the show was the JAS Plato speakers ($22,800/pr). Powered by JAS’ own tube amplifiers the sound was very good but I kept thinking of other amps that I felt may have gotten a bit more out of them. This was also the first room I saw that had some type of system designed to be used with Apple iPod and there were many of them.

                       
Alan Warshaw of Jason Scott Distributing is bringing in the Jungson line of electronics and speakers. They had the misfortune of not having their entire system operational when I first visited them but they definitely had something that piqued my interest. Standing like some kind of extraterrestrial centurions were a huge pair of Jungson loudspeakers. I made sure to return to this room the next day and boy am I glad I did. It was amazing how well these giants simply disappeared in the showroom. There was something very magical going on in this room and I hope to see and hear more from this company in the future. This speaker, once they finally got the room together, was one of the best sounding speakers I heard all weekend. Jungson also has a full line of beautifully finished tube amps.

 

       
The extremely pleasant Ping Gong of AAA Audio is importing more new lines of high-end electronics from companies like Original, Xindak, and Dussun. They had a very nice sounding demo using the Original CD2008 CD player ($1,598), Dussun V8i integrated amp ($2,998), and Tetra 306 loudspeakers ($4,900/pr). These pyramid shaped speakers contain a 1” tweeter and 6” midrange/woofer and sit on 3” high stands. The components were connected to a Xindak XF 2000 power filter. The sound was very musical and engaging. This is a very nice system that won’t break the bank or take up too much space in your living room.

                               

Margules Audio is a company that gives me a reason to be hopeful about the future of high-end audio. This is a Mexico-based manufacturer of high-quality, great sounding, and outstanding value audiophile products. They actually make two lines of products: Margules and Magenta. The Margules line offers sweetly musical classic-sounding tube amplifiers and some very nice sounding speakers particularly the Orpheus which at $6,870/pr are an exceptional deal. They were being driven by the 60-watt U280sc tube amplifier ($3,300) which gives you the flexibility of running them in mono for increased power (120-watts/ch) and they give you the added flexibility of running them in either ultralinear or triode modes. This is a sweet combination that I hope to hear more of this year.

                 
On the final day of the show I was surveying some of the rooms that were still active late on Sunday afternoon. The mass exodus had already begun as the shipping guys started showing up, ready to get things packed up. But one room that still had a pounding pulse was the Butler Audio/Pipe Dreams/Revelation Audio Labs room. This was another room that used the Butler Audio Monad amplifiers but it also used the Esoteric UX-1 CD player and the system was wired with the very exciting Revelation Audio Labs cables. While I was unable to spend as much time in this room as I wanted to, hopefully, I’ll have an opportunity to tell you more about these products in the months to come. This system left an impression on me.
                  

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