LATEST ADDITIONS

The great thing about the Home Entertainment shows is the accessibility of great music. Seeing the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet at normal concert venue would find me with the typical seating I procure for paid events – somewhere near the back of the room. But with a little planning and penchant for arriving early, I just enjoyed four of the worlds most accomplished guitarists from the front row. I left invigorated and inspired to go home and try some of the techniques exhibited (beating on my guitar like a drum seems like one of the techniques I might be able to perfect). Telarc recording artists LAGQ hung around after the show at Telarc booths, with Sweet Amanda Sweet, signing autographs for their fans.

MBL had some great sound in their room. Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" left me with goose bumps and Leonard Cohen's baritone vibrated through my being. While a playing of the "1812 Overture" was meant to highlight the dynamic abilities of the system (the demonstration only partially succeeded in this), I still find that these big speakers are at their best with more minimalist music, imparting the human voice, that violin of the gods, with a sweetness and believability that is rarely captured.

The system, composed of the MBL Reference line speakers mbl 101E ($46,900 / pr) and monoblock mbls 9011 amps ($73,200 / pr), mbl 6010 preamp ($19,000), mbl 1621 transport ($19,000) and mbl 1611 dac ($21,000), all run with Tara Omega speaker cables ($10K/pr) and Tara Zero digital cable ($6,000) and Zero interconnects ($14,000 / pair). And you need a couple of pair of interconnects too, so this stuff starts to add up big time. You do the math. If I had this kind of money, I'd pay off my mortgage first.

Late Thursday I made it over to Sony's Blu-ray demo theater display, where I was treated to the most extensive Blu-ray demo I've yet seen. Sony had a demo BD that was put together to show off not only clips from many popular films (<I>Spider-Man 2</I>, <I>Chronicles of Narnia</I> and the digitally animated <I>Chicken Little</I> among others) but also the first look at BD's dynamic interactivity.