Premiere Design

MBL has its fingers in just about every audiophile pie there is, from CD players and DACs to preamps and integrated amps to power amps and speakers to cables, racks, and speaker stands. In terms of source devices, the company's ne plus ultra is the 1621A CD transport and 1611F digital-to-analog converter (DAC).

One of the biggest audio sensations at CES wasn't a megabucks speaker—it was the Triton Two tower from GoldenEar Technology. The company was recently started by Sandy Gross and Don Givogue, who had been partners at Definitive Technology (Gross also co-founded Polk), to raise the bar on speaker performance and value. They seem to have hit a home run with the Triton Two, which is available in a stereo pair or as part of the TritonCinema multichannel system for a price that will surprise you.

As always, there was no shortage of ultra-high-end speakers at CES this year. Among the most impressive was the magnificent Duke from Austrian speaker maker Trenner & Friedl.

It seems that many high-end optical-disc players these days also serve as processors for digital-audio files from a computer via USB—for example, the recently profiled Ayre DX-5. Another new entrant in this emerging product category is the S7i from American digital-audio stalwart Wadia.

The title of this Ultimate Gear entry identifies the DX-5 as a "universal disc player"—the better to snag search-engine hits with—but American manufacturer Ayre Acoustics calls it a "universal A/V engine." Why? In addition to playing every available audio and video optical-disc format, this box also provides a USB port that allows it to act as a portal for the music files on a computer.

Departing from the spherical-enclosure paradigm as embodied in its La Sphère and L'Océan powered speakers, Cabasse this week announced the availability of a new floorstanding design, the Pacific 3SA. However, this speaker does incorporate the SCS (Spatially Coherent System) coaxial-driver design found in those models.

Last May, I profiled the new M-Class Blu-ray movie server from Kaleidescape, which lets you rip Blu-rays to a server's hard disk and stream their high-def content to any M-Class player connected to your home's Ethernet network. There was only one problem—the physical disc had to be inserted in an M500 player in order to satisfy Blu-ray's copy-protection requirements, which defeats the purpose of a movie server. Today, the company announces a solution to that problem—the Modular Disc Vault.