Acapella, Wilson Audio, Avalon, Dynaudio, Sound Lab

 

The Acapella High Violin Mk IV ($59k), however, was a different story. This beautiful three-way with horn-loaded plasma (!) tweeter, spherical-horn-loaded midrange, and two 11-inch woofers in an isobaric enclosure, made a beautiful sound–very smooth, liquid mids and dark, sweet, liquid highs. The bass was also quite dense in color and nuance, though it overloaded the room a bit on one side. The High Violin might not have been the most dead-neutral sound at CES but, driven by Einstein electronics, it was certainly among the most musical.

We now leave the 30th floor and leap to the 34th, where the Wilson Audio MAXX 2s ($45k) made their best showing since I heard them driven by ARC electronics several years ago, thanks to Vladmir Lamm’s fabulous new four-chassis ML-3 monoblock amplifiers (priced at a cool $135k) and TW Acustic’s supremely musical AC-3 turntable (reviewed by me in Issue 180).

This marvelous system reproduced the Prokofiev First Violin Sonata with superb definition, timbre, bass, and soundstage depth, combining incredible “sustainâ€? on pedaled piano notes with incredible control and detail in the fiddle. That said, there was a slight, persistent spot of added brightness in the upper mids and lower treble followed by a slight roll-off in the top treble–a profile I associate with Wilson’s tweeter. Still and all, this was a great stereo system (and a great debut for Vladimir’s amp). Clearly, another top contender for Best of Show.

 

And so was the three-way/four-driver Avalon Indra ($20k), which reproduced Cohn’s “Ghost Train� (and other select cuts) with exceptional openness and astonishingly good, powerful, and detailed deep bass (from two 7-inch Nomex/Kevlar woofers). Though a bit smaller than life in imaging, this speaker disappeared more completely as a sound source than anything I’d heard up until that point (save for the Mini IIs and V3s). Another top contender for Best of Show.

The big, D’Appolito-arrayed, multidriver Dynaudio Evidence Temptations ($30k) were being shown in the Boulder room, along with Boulder’s 1021 CD player, 1010 preamp, and 1050 monoblocks. I have to admit that the sound here was what I would have called, before RMAF, “typical Boulder,� which is to say, typical solid-state. But having heard the Boulder gear sound wonderful with Focal speakers in Denver, I don’t know if what I heard at CES was the result of a bad room or a poor combination of electronics and loudspeaker, or, contrarily, if what I heard at RMAF was just a lucky accident.

Next-door was the IsoMike room, where eight huge Sound Lab Pro-Stats ($34k/pair) were being fed IsoMike surround tapes through EMMLabs electronics. The recording I heard, of piano, was superb. IsoMiked or not, the Pro-Stats (commercial versions of the Sound Lab M-1a’s) are one of the truly great full-range electrostats, with simply gorgeous timbre from low bass to top treble.

Next: TAD, Vienna Acoustics, MBL, German Physiks

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