Tom Norton

Silverline was demonstrating two different speakers, the floorstanding Prelude ($1200/pair) and the small Minuet ($600/pair). I heard the Preludes ($1200/pair). One attendee remarked that the Preludes sounded better than a lot of more expensive speakers at the show. Apart from a trace of aggressive brightness, which could well have been due to a completely untreated room, I have to agree. The speakers sounded more dynamic, and bigger, than their size might suggest. Silverline makes a wide range of speakers, including a center channel (which at $1200, may be a little pricey to mate with the Preludes).

Back on the limited home theater front, Meridian/Faroudja had a small room with both audio and video, the latter a modest flat panel display. The heart of the audio system was the new Meridian G95 ($8495), a complete processor/amp/DVD player all in one case; in other words, it's a high-end DVD AV receiver, offering five channels of 100Wpc amplification. But it does have limitations, which are rather surprising for such an expensive device. There is no DVD-Audio playback (Meridian has long been a champion of that format), and no way to get an external multichannel source into the receiver (there is no multichannel analog input and no HDMI switching to provide multichannel audio on HDMI). The only HDMI connection is the HDMI output for the internal DVD player.

Freddie G. beat me to the punch on the new Krell speakers, but they're worth a few extra words. At $35,000/pair the Modulare Duos are hardly cheap, but Krell's charter has always been cutting edge design, not designing to a price point. Based on the sound I heard from their two-channel setup in a relatively large demo room (plenty big enough for a home theater demo—helpful hint for next year!?) they are definitely cutting edge. I'm sure the Krell electronics used to drive them weren't hurting the overall result, either. Their pricey Scandinavian drivers and solid aluminum enclosures might just have been making the best sound I will hear at the show, though it's still too early to go that far. A lot of rooms are yet to be visited.

One of the interesting new features of this year's show is a variety of workshops, many of them to be presented more than once throughout the show. There are workshops on amplifier measurements, amplifier listening, speaker auditioning, speaker measurements, the peak power demands of music, and active loudspeakers. The Stereophile Analog Clinic also continues, as in past shows.