LATEST ADDITIONS

Begun as a collaboration of several companies, the Nordic Tone ended up as Electrocompaniet's first high-end speaker when the others dropped out for one reason or another. First shown at the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival in November, the Nordic Tone's infinite-baffle (i.e., sealed) enclosure is sand-cast aluminum consisting of five sections glued together with vibration-damping adhesive. Its 3-way design achieves a frequency response from 28Hz to 35kHz, and it sounded great, with tight bass, uncluttered mids, and crisp highs, but what else should you expect for $29,000/pair?

I was excited to visit Electrocompaniet and see its new Maestro, an all-singing, all-dancing source component with Blu-ray player, FM tuner, Internet radio, iPod dock, and media streaming with three channels of 120W, all for $8000. You can also get a wireless 2-channel amp for the rear speakers for an extra $2000. Unfortunately, it was experiencing some technical difficulties, so there was nothing to see or hear, but I was told that the Norwegian engineers are working around the clock to update the software before the end of the show.

First announced at CEDIA in September, the AVR500 is a stripped down version of the AVR600 with no preamp outs, no phono input, and two sub outs instead of three. It provides 100Wpc of Class AB power and uses a Pixelworks video processor for $3800.

I profiled this tube-based integrated amp with iPod dock <A href="http://blog.ultimateavmag.com/ultimate-gear/the_ultimate_ipod_accessory/..., but I got to hear it at the Venetian. The amp was driving Gershman Acoustics speakers, and the iPod was playing Ella Fitzgerald in uncompressed WAV files, which sounded fantastic.