CES 2009

In the TAD room at the Venetian, speaker engineer Andrew Jones was demonstrating the $30,000/pair TAD Compact reference stand-mount speaker, which features a sophisticated coaxial midrange tweeter driver with beryllium cone/dome material (Similar drivers are used in the far less expensive Pioneer speakers also designed by Jones, though they use beryllium only for the tweeter dome.

The room also featured demonstration of 24-bit/196kHz, 2-channel music, much of it recorded by recording engineer Bill Schnee, who was on hand to discuss his enthusiasm for the format. Most of it sounded fabulous on the TAD speakers, limited only by the modestly-powered (100W) Pass amplifiers. Shnee and others are pushing to get such 24/96 material released on music-only Blu-ray disc.