February 2, 2012 by Michael

CES 2012 – TAD Laboratories

This year the TAD room displayed their E1 speakers, along side their usual, larger Reference One speakers. 100% TAD electronics here, some on a HRS ‘MXR’ rack and some on another rack [which, although ubiquitous, their name escapes me. They say now that our vocabulary peaks in our 60s and 70s. But how is this going to be of any use at all to me if I can’t remember anything? And I have decades to go. Argh.].

The photos will be a little confusing because they have several different ‘islands’ of gear on static display, which is turned on and so looks like it is part of the system but which, in fact, it is not.

I sat and listened a little here. They announced they were going to put on a track from Supertramp that they had recorded off a tape that was a clone of the master tape. Cool. Turned out to be off the Crime Of The Century album. And as you see on the laptop at the bottom of this post, the cut was recorded in AIFF at 192x? at 9216 kbps. The cut was a familiar classic and what could be more fun – there is way too little classic rock-and-roll at these shows.

But, after the first few staccato notes, the sound became really confused and jumbled. Not like good old rock-and-roll confused and jumbled, but like one of my first systems with early digital confused, jumbled, weirdly compressed at places, notes running into each other, but not consistently, so the brain could not analyze, understand and at least be able to ‘tune out’ the errors [which the brain is excellent at doing]. Perhaps this is what the master tape sounds like? I have a bootleg Supertramp LP around here somewhere – curious – I should find it and see if we have a better version.

What I should have done is waited to see if they would play a CD. THEN we would know a lot more about what was going on here.

The smaller TAD E1 speakers next to the beefy Reference One speakers.

The TAD C2000 preamp on static display

The TAD M600 monoblock amplifier

The TAD D600 CD player and remote control on static display

The TAD D600 CD player on static display

The TAD D600 CD player and power supply. I think one of these black box power supplies, which seem made of the same material that goes into their platforms, is supplied with each one of their components.