CES Las Vegas, 2013

[Jason]

Las Vegas is a surreal place, nothing in it is much more than a façade and the faux Romanesque fountains in Caesar’s Palace are just ludicrous, so as you can imagine it’s not always possible to get a grip, especially when you are dazed by jet lag. But I found a kind of reality in the neon boneyard (above), a museum of old casinos and hotel signs from back in the day, and on a cold bright morning in January there’s nothing like broken bulbs and rusting metal to bring the transient nature of glitz into focus.

The point of the exercise however was to find out what excitements the audio world has to offer over the coming months and the speciality audio section of CES is full of the very latest luxurious metalwork and the shiniest new speakers. In among them are some pretty decent sounding systems too, not least that put together by John Devore the New York based loudspeaker builder whose ‘highly sensitive’ creations carry the names of primates, but that’s where the monkeying about stops.

This year he had a slew of new models, a floorstanding yet smaller footprint version of the Orangutan 96 (recently reviewed on The Ear) called Orangutan 93 (above), the number indicating just how sensitive this particular speaker is. John has also been working on the Gibbon range upgrading the model 8 floorstander to Gibbon 88 guise and moving the model 9 to X or 10 status with some fairly big revisions. It was the Gibbon X that John was demonstrating, now a full three-way it has two bass drivers and a new tweeter, the company’s first in eight years, the final change is hybrid transmission line loading for the midrange – the first example of this approach I’ve encountered.

In the past Devore has used valve electronics from Shindo Labs among others in this demonstrations but this year he decided to mix things up with some solid state power. Selecting a Naim Nait XS with FlatCap XS power supply, a choice that worked remarkably well, so well in fact that this relatively affordable system (Gibbon X are $11,000) by CES standards, had the best timing that I encountered at the event. He played vinyl which helps but there was plenty of that in action, so clearly there is a synergy between the Naim and Devore that helps things along rather well. He played me some Pantha du Prince, fashionably obscure German electronica, that sounded rather good but when I put in a request for some ZZ Top the superiority of the system became clear. He selected Hot, Blues and Righteous from Tres Hombres and I was sold, not only does this system do justice to Billy Gibbons’ beautiful guitar tone but it lets you know in no uncertain terms just how effortlessly the band could play. The sound defined the overused term tight but loose, this is a slow blues track but the pace was rock solid without any overemphasis. I was transported and could have whiled away the rest of the day if there weren’t another fifty plus rooms to visit and never enough time.

Xerxes designer Touraj Moghaddam was also in Vegas and alongside his broad range of Vertere cables he was having a whale of a time demonstrating a new tonearm. The Vertere Reference arm is a cost-no-object exercise by a man with a very strong track record for innovation in vinyl replay systems. This is the arm that Touraj has always wanted to make and the £22,000 price reflects as much but so does the thinking and execution. For a start the armtube and headshell are hewn from solid titanium, the tube has a wall thickness of 0.4mm so is exceptionally stiff yet light, the counterweight is an advanced variation of that seen on the Roksan Artemiz with a ball race that allows a pendulum counterweight to sit optimally. But the really radical stuff is in the bearings such as they are, these are in different positions for lateral and vertical movement and are not ball races nor gimbals but membranes that only allow as much movement as you need. The theory is that rotating bearings offer an initial resistance to movement and that you don’t need an arm to rotate because it only needs to track the radius of a vinyl record. When installed on a TechDas Air Force One turntable from Japan this arm produced a sound that was phenomenally powerful, fine detailed and precisely timed. Vertere’s US distributor was using it to play the bangin’ tunes of Infected Mushrooms at alarming levels yet the sound was incredibly clean and open.

I grumbled to Touraj about the price and he explained that not only has he spent the last two years developing it but that it carries a lifetime guarantee and that he will personally install each one. He also expects to trickle down the technology into more affordable products, so there is always hope!