Series 3

All prices are quoted in euros unless otherwise noted.
1 €  is approximately 1.19 US dollars at time of report.

Peter Suchy (left) -- the president of Clearaudio, Germany's well-known turntable manufacturer -- and Doug Schneider enthusiastically discussed the apparent increase in vinyl sales worldwide and the resulting increase in demand for turntables. Jason Thorpe just reviewed Clearaudio's newest, most affordable 'table, the Emotion, in "The Vinyl Word" on SoundStage!.

Tomer Tsin Osnaim made the trip from Israel to capture the show. Last year he uploaded roughly 250 photos to his site. This year he hopes to have just as many (they will be available in a week or so following the show). Where can you find him online? At www.oznaim.co.il, of course.

In Amphion's demo room, Corrado Faccioni, owner of Corfac2, startled us all with the effectiveness of his newest tweak.

The yet-unnamed plug you see above fits into any "open" RCA digital input on a CD player or DAC. Instructions: plug in, sit back, listen. Did it work? From our brief audition, we thought it did -- surprisingly well. Jeff thought it had an effect on "upper-frequency noise," while Doug Schneider noticed a slight taming of the sharpness in, for example, the sound of guitar. Others in the room noted an increase in dimensionality and soundstage specificity. What is the device exactly? We don't know, but Corrado did say that it's much more than just a simple shorting plug. The price is 33 €.

If you've been thinking that no one is talking about multichannel SACD anymore, think again. Sony's keeping the fire alive and once again put on a full multichannel SACD music demonstration, this time using MusikElectronik Geithain RL 901K active loudspeakers.

Used primarily in the professional-audio world, the RL 901K can reportedly output 116dB at 100Hz. The price is 11,000 € per pair.

Finally, not content to do just a speaker shootout, Audio and Stereoplay magazines contrasted three amplifier technologies as well. The amplifier contestants were Ayre's transistor-based V-5x, Cayin's triode-tube-based 9088D, and Octave's pentode-tube-based MRE 120. All amps were played into Wilson Alexandria X-2 speakers. As with the speaker demo, the results were interesting; however, unlike with the speakers, the differences here were subtle -- far more subtle.