Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Musical Surroundings is the distributor (importer) for Aesthetix and AMG.

This system was more musical – the notes more harmonically rich and a little more natural bloom on the dynamics of the notes – than most Aesthetix / Vandersteen systems I have heard, most of which had a Clearaudio turntable instead of this AMG turntable. Whether the AMG turntable is more musical, or the cartridge it was using is more musical, or they retubed the Aesthetix in such a way as to be more musical, I don’t know.

The AMG turntable appeared in several rooms [and I think beyond just the other Musical Surroundings rooms].

The AMG turntable

The AMG turntable

The AMG turntable

The HRS SXR equipment rack, full of equipment. HRS had their racks in 14 rooms at CES this year.

The new Vandersteen 5a Carbon speakers

The new Vandersteen 5a Carbon speakers

Aesthetix preamp

Aesthetix Romulus CD Player

Aesthetix Atlas amplifier

They had a couple of open chassis on static display. I tried to photograph the front, then the innards. Not sure what this one is.. perhaps a phono stage.

The Aesthetix Callisto Eclipse preamp also had an open chassis…

The Aesthetix Callisto Eclipse preamp ‘s electronic guts…

Genesis G7.2f speaker

Genesis G7.2f speaker

Genesis reference amplifier

Funk Saffire turntable

Funk Saffire turntable

Funk Saffire turntable

Funk Saffire turntable

Yet another room using a laptop as a source

SMc Audio VRE-1C preamplifier

Yet another MSB Platinum Signature DAC IV

Did not get a shot of the entire system in this room. The nice exhibitor was talking to me while I was in this room and as often happens, I forget to take this or that photo. In this case, the photo of the entire system.

The fella kept saying that he was playing music off his smartphone – and I kept asking did he really mean he was controlling the Aurender music server with his smartphone or was he really sending a ton of data over wifi from his phone over to the Da Vinci DAC. He seemed to indicate the latter – and if so, then it seems to me like the smartphone must a) have a lot of memory and b) the DAC must be doing a lot of buffering to handle the inevitable wifi dropouts and hiccups and c) this would be really cool. But none of the components seems to support this kind of thing, although the silver Light Harmonic box does not seem to be documented anywhere…

Light Harmonic’s Da Vinci DAC. Hard to see in this photos, but the white line on the side of the DAC ‘lights up’ – really accentuating its ‘stealth fighter’ look.

Light Harmonic’s Da Vinci DAC.

Light Harmonic’s Da Vinci DAC from below

Light Harmonic’s Da Vinci DAC

Light Harmonic’s Da Vinci DAC open chassis [albeit the electronics has been removed]

This speaker that looks a little like a Wilson Sophia is unknown to me.

Pass Labs XA 100.5 amplifier

Pass Labs XA 100.5 amplifier

Pass Labs XA 100.5 amplifier

Pass Labs XA 100.5 amplifier

Pass Labs XP-20 preamplifier

Aurender A10 music server

Motus Audio is new to me. They manufacture speaker drivers. The system sounded okay, but I am really not able to judge given my unfamiliarity with the components in this system. Now, if they did a shootout… that would be illuminating … and fun and interesting…

Motus Audio speaker

Motus Audio room equipment rack

Motus Audio room equipment rack

Modus Audio speaker

Modus Audio speaker

Motus Audio speaker driver

Ayre amplifier

MSB was all over the place at this show. They must have brought an extra 10 systems, because all sorts of people who needed an extra piece or two because of extenuating circumstances were showing up with MSB in their rooms.

YG Acoustics Kipod II speaker

MSB Technology S200 Stereo Amplifier

MSB Technology Platinum Diamond DAC IV and Power Base

MSB Technology Signature Data CD IV

MSB Technology Universal Media Transport and Power Base

YG Acoustics Kipod II speaker

YG Acoustics Kipod II speake

YG Acoustics Kipod II speake

MSB Technology Platinum Diamond DAC IV comes in multiple colors

MSB Technology Platinum Diamond DAC IV in red

Back (rear) of red MSB Technology Platinum Diamond DAC IV

WBT makes lots of connectors for the high-end audio industry.

OK, I didn’t take any closeup photos here.

It takes me awhile to get up the gumption to kind of just push past clusters of talking people and get up close and personal with the equipment.

And gumption to stand in front of the equipment, blocking the listener’s view [I try to stand in the center, mucking up soundstaging but not blocking a speaker, at least (Although in the big Lamm room I got distracted – having fun taking a photo of the ONEDOF turntable manufacturer – until Neli, who was also there, shooed me out of the way. Oops. Sorry guys). ].

And I know my camera [Canon 5D Mark One] is one of the noisiest on the planet. Not so good for an audio show, huh?

But I will do better soon. Next room in fact…

This is the hallway that leads from where we were to the casino and the Venetian Towers where all the other rooms are.

It was extraordinarily crowded down here this year, although I do not know if it was anomalous or crowded like this all the time [unlike previous years, where we would visit rooms down here just about everyday – as well as go down here for the long walk back to the Alexis Park (in the olden days when that was where the THE Show was) – I never did make it back down here].

Well, they were standing around chatting and not playing music – so don’t know how it sounded here. There are very few rooms where I feel comfortable [and feel it is worth it ] interrupting people and asking them to put some music on.

Looks like Ocean Way brought some smaller monitors along with them this year.

This room always pairs lots of big honking amps with big honking speakers.

As you will see, there were lots of Oppo CD players here this year.

Ocean Way does a lot of work for Hollywood.

A better closeup of the front-end.

For those of us who walk back and forth to the Flamingo, or, in fact, anyone who enters the Venetian from the Las Vegas Strip, this is the entrance we, uh, enter. About 1/4 mile of various moving walkways…

This quarter mile… seriously it is boring, so most people look out over the Strip…

This is a photo taken around 6:15pm after the end of the 1st day, from the moving walkway. Colorful, huh? 🙂

This is outside the press registration / pickup on the 4th floor of the Venetian conference center. There used to be some exhibits to see on the 2nd floor. I think there may also have been a couple of mainstream home audio exhibits, however, there was only one room down here this year that I could find that might be considered high-end audio [fine line, I know]

And so we start our journey there…

Lots of photos, about 4000 I think [we will have an exact number sometime later today] and most will go up on the site: in the Show Galleries if not in this blog.

Stereophile is doing a post for every component – Google likes this sort of thing. But if we do that then this show report will be about 1000 to 1500 posts long. So…. maybe just one post per room?

Yes, I will talk about the sound. And Neli heard a lot of these rooms this year, so I’ll try and include her observations when they do not exactly coincide with mine.

You know, the way I think of the sound of a system is as a list of attributes where the system falls short of ‘perfection’, how far an attribute is from perfection, and in what ways it manifests this imperfection. Sometimes, hopefully, some attributes may be better than ‘perfect’, i.e. they are exceeding the expectations one might have for a mythical perfect system [usually this starts taking into account emotional aspects, or the inherent technological limitations being overcome in some way, etc] .

Problem is that posting the list of attributes where the system falls short of perfection – which is all one can say about 90%+ of the rooms, comes off as being more negative than I would like.

Jonathan Valin’s approach [who is the only other person who talks about the sound] consists of finding something good to say [usually] no matter how vacuous, and then a couple of general negatives [unless he likes the sound in which case it seems it has no negatives]. Besides the fact that his idea of perfection does not attribute as much weight to the subtleties of the sound as mine does, I am just not a person who can make up vacuous positives for bad sounding systems and ignore negatives of the good sounding ones. It’s a curse, I know 🙂

I’ve already tried the film noir detective approach – which came off badly for most people [it was fun for me tho :-)]. And here I am reading another detective novel. And unfortunately this one isn’t Stephanie Plum or Lisa Lutz’s Izzy Spellman, which might be kind of fun to intersect with a show report. 🙂

All this is to say that I will indeed talk about the sound, however, I am just not sure how I am going to put it all yet… 🙂