Scott Wilkinson

Samsung's booth was awash in new LCD TVs—no less than eight lines of slim LED edge-lit sets and six lines of conventional CCFL models. As many have expected, there are no new LED backlit sets, which Samsung claims are too expensive and power hungry for the current consumer marketplace.

Begun as a collaboration of several companies, the Nordic Tone ended up as Electrocompaniet's first high-end speaker when the others dropped out for one reason or another. First shown at the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival in November, the Nordic Tone's infinite-baffle (i.e., sealed) enclosure is sand-cast aluminum consisting of five sections glued together with vibration-damping adhesive. Its 3-way design achieves a frequency response from 28Hz to 35kHz, and it sounded great, with tight bass, uncluttered mids, and crisp highs, but what else should you expect for $29,000/pair?

I was excited to visit Electrocompaniet and see its new Maestro, an all-singing, all-dancing source component with Blu-ray player, FM tuner, Internet radio, iPod dock, and media streaming with three channels of 120W, all for $8000. You can also get a wireless 2-channel amp for the rear speakers for an extra $2000. Unfortunately, it was experiencing some technical difficulties, so there was nothing to see or hear, but I was told that the Norwegian engineers are working around the clock to update the software before the end of the show.

First announced at CEDIA in September, the AVR500 is a stripped down version of the AVR600 with no preamp outs, no phono input, and two sub outs instead of three. It provides 100Wpc of Class AB power and uses a Pixelworks video processor for $3800.