Top Audio & Video 2003 Milan, Italy

Sunday Part 1

  U-Vola of Italy offers these unique oval loudspeakers in many different colors and designs. The driver is dual-concentric with the tweeter mounted centrally in the midrange/woofer driver. These loudspeakers are hung by a wire from the ceiling and simply dangle downward.

 

The Italy arm of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) offers many reference books. Don't forget we here at Enjoy the Music.com will be covering the New York AES show in only a few weeks so stay tuned!

 

A wall full and then some of great vinyl including rock, jazz, classical and Italian from Galbiati Vinile.

 

And for those of you wondering, the show was a resounding success with an incredible amount of attendees.

 

Showing how important the Top Audio & Video show is, VTL chose this event to have their European launch of the the new big, bad, and black (like Shaft.... damn right) Siegfried amplifier (€75,000). It has an amazing supporting circuitry that not only monitors the bias, it can detect the exact tube that has failed (among other duties). A front LCD gives confirmation of the twelve 6550 tubes that in total produce 800 watts in push-pull, or 400 in triode mode.

 

Ultrasound loudspeakers feature four centrally located tweeters with a dipole midrange on top and ported enclosure woofer at the bottom. The unit has four loudspeaker binding posts for bi-wire/amplification.

 

The conrad-johnson Premier 17LS pre-amplifier, one of my personal; fave pre's by the way, was making wonderful music with the McCormack DNA-225 amplifier and Magnepan loudspeakers. See my review of the 17LS by clicking here.

 

Proudly showing their tube amplification is Vincent with their CD-S6 CD player and SA-T1 pre-amplifier. The CD player has coax (S/PDIF) digital out and analog via RCA jacks. It also can decode HDCD encoded discs and has a front headphone jack. The SA-T1 features six stereo inputs plus two stereo line level outputs to support bi-amplification.

 

Theta's Generation VIII digital signal processor (€17,200) offers a staggering array of flexibility for digial-philes. Too much to list here, though it decodes and processes just about everything you can think of... and then some.

 

Perhaps soon to be relinquished to the "come and gone after the standard five year business plan" is Tag McLaren. Perhaps an interesting continuing story and business lessen learnt footnote to what TAG did to the once great Heuer watch brand, or current results of their Formula 1 race team. Your guess is as good as mine, though business as usual never the less.

 

Click here for Part 2