Premiere Design

When I first heard about the flagship 069 CD player from German high-end manufacturer <A href="http://www.burmester.de/en/">Burmester Audio</A>, I was surprised to learn that it is belt driven. Of course, many LP turntables use belt drives, but I'd never heard of a CD player with such a mechanism, which is said to decouple the platter from the rest of the chassis, eliminating vibrations and allowing the data to be read with considerably higher precision and less jitter.

Considering all the recent brouhaha about the $3500 Lexicon BD-30 actually being a rebranded Oppo BDP-83 (list price $500), I was suspicious when I saw a CES press release introducing the MVP881 universal disc player from <A href="http://www.mcintoshlabs.com">McIntosh Laboratory</A>. But then I read that the MVP881 uses the HQV Realta video processor, whereas the Oppo/Lexicon uses VRS from Anchor Bay, so it can't be another more-expensive knock-off.

At CES last January, <A href="http://www.snellacoustics.com">Snell Acoustics</A> announced the availability of its Phantom B7 speaker, which was first shown at CES 2009. What makes the Phantom B7 special? It's engineered to provide much of the performance of the company's flagship Illusion A7 at a fraction of the price and size.

<A href="http://www.nbscables.com">NBS</A> is perhaps best known for high-end cables&#151;its URL is nbscables.com, after all&#151;but this American boutique audio company also makes a few unusual speakers and electronic components. I'm especially intrigued by the Universal Power Amplifier (UPA), a unique monoblock that is truly universal in design and operation.

Among the maladies to which music lovers are especially susceptible, hearing damage caused by prolonged exposure to loud sounds is perhaps the most pernicious. When you're young, you normally don't think about the consequences of cranking up the volume, but if you do that routinely, you are sure to suffer some form of hearing deficit in your later&#151;or, in some cases, not so later&#151;years.

Most home-theater geeks prefer to buy separate components in order to optimize the performance of each one and allow them to be swapped out independently for repair or upgrade. But what if you don't have enough space to accommodate all those separate devices? <A href="http://www.usa.denon.com">Denon</A>'s answer is the new S-5BD, which combines a full-featured Blu-ray player and AVR into one compact package.

Horn speakers have been around almost since the invention of electrical-to-mechanical transducer technology, and they still enjoy widespread use today, especially in commercial cinemas. But cinema speakers use horns that limit the vertical dispersion of their sound, whereas circular horns used by a few high-end speaker manufacturers radiate sound in a spherical pattern. Among the proponents of this approach is German maker <A href="http://www.acapella.de/en/">Acapella</A>, which introduced a new model to its lineup at CES, the High Violoncello II, which, like all Acapella products, is distributed in North America by <A href="http://www.aaudioimports.com">Aaudio Imports</A>.