Music tastes just not gelling between editor and show hosts

Another letdown, for the second year running, was the $100k+ Continuum Caliburn record player and Cobra arm (equipped with Lyra Olympus cartridge)

To be fair, the system that the Continuum was feeding wasn’t to my taste: $80k German-Physiks PQS-402 loudspeakers (which use two Walsh-like drivers and a sub tower), powered by Boulder electronics. Nonetheless, I tried my damndest to “listen throughâ€? to the turntable itself. I first asked to hear some chamber music and was told not just that they didn’t have any but that didn’t know what chamber music meant. We’re into AC/DC, said the guy running the turntable. Not an auspicious start.

I persevered and found a record that I know by heart sitting in a pile of jazz and rock–Joan Baez’s Farewell Angelina in the excellent Cisco repressing. I listened closely to several tracks and–just like the year before–came away wondering what the fuss was about. Baez’s voice is like a piece of Dale Chihuly glass, filled with delicate little tremolos and ripples of color. Through the Caliburn these nuances were uniformly coarsened and damped down. Oh, everything was there all right, but nothing there was right. Even Baez’s guitar lost the full glory of its tone colors and the delicacy of her touch.

Thinking that it had to be the speakers and the electronics that were the problems, I moved to a different room where Continuum was showing its new cheaper record player, the Criterion and Copperhead arm, with Peak Consult speakers. Though the sound was better here–livelier, albeit brighter–it still wasn’t close to world-class.

Return to CES 2007 report