Nordost at CES 2012

Nordost always has shootouts of their cables against each other in their exhibit room at these shows. These shootouts are controlled [i.e. they play music of their choice, so they can make the differences as apparent as possible (esp. for those who never heard cables sound different before, most of whom seem compelled to post profusely on the lesser quality forums), and these shootouts last about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes] – and typically performed on a modest, yet quite dynamic, system.

“Room 29-125 in the Venetian Towers is our demonstration room. The spotlight will be shared between Lars Kristensen (pictured above) and Bjorn Bengtsson (pictured below). The guys alternate during the four days and each have plenty of jaw dropping demonstrations to share!”

“The greatest thing about the Nordost demonstrations is it’s all about proving things. You will never walk into our room where we pat ourselves on the back about how cool our packaging looks. Or simply talk about how great our technology is and how much better it is than others. The proof is always in the pudding and if your ears can hear the difference then it exists.

It’s why we always do active demonstrations where we show you that as you climb up the Nordost ladder you hear the differences.”

Lamm at CES 2012

Lamm has two rooms up in the Venetian Towers, on floor 35, just like previous years.

Unlike last year’s historic showing with the Wilson Audio Alexandria X-2 speakers in the large room, this year they are reverting back to the more modest Wilson MAXX 3 speakers driven by the Lamm ML3 amps.

New this year, however, is ONEDOF’s $150K turntable, which deputed at RMAF 2010 and we got to hear at RMAF 2011, albeit with inferior equipment and cartridge [if you are interested in hearing what the turntable actually sounds like]. The Neodio digital is actually pretty good, so the turntables in this room have to be pretty decent just to keep up, IMHO.

The smaller room looks the be about the same as last year, Lamm ML2.2 amps on Verity Lohengrin, with the addition of the Kronos turntable [there is no rack listed, so that could also be a surprise].

ZSHifi: Marten Coltrane Supreme / Bladelius

And here is another entry in our continual pursuit of cool Sightings, in the wild, as it were. People often point us to extreme high-end systems they run across. And here is another written up by a dealer in Taiwan [thanks to Florian for finding this].


ZS HiFi: The world’s first pair of users Marten Coltrane Supreme

Apparently the this Taiwan dealer was one of the first, if not the first, to sell a pair [or is that quad?] of Coltrane Supreme speakers.

Their customer’s system, that we see here, is running a Bladelius CD player and amp. Bladelius makes the subwoofer amp that the Supremes use and is another Swedish company.

I note how that have a video screen mounted in the ceiling behind/between the speakers. We have been wanting to do this for forever but for some husband/wife arguing about precise positioning and size issues [take that however you want :-)].

They also have a little Marten Duke monitor speaker on their equipment rack. And B&O speakers in the ceiling corners.

I love the look of the highly polished floor [wood or bamboo] and the speaker’s reflection but wonder at the sonic consequences.

I used the Google Chrome browser to translate the page, and I have to tell you, even translated it is not easy to understand much of what is being said. They run Karaoke through the Marten Dukes… OK…. but movies too? Seems like such a waste… 🙂