CES 2009

Do it yourself (DIY) speaker builders gravitate to one of several suppliers to buy the parts they need for their projects. One of the biggest is Parts Express, and they had a small booth on the show floor this year. The elegant cabinet shown here, with the arched side walls now popular on many an upscale commercial design (almost invariably made in China), can be had for $129.77 (each) in polished black, cherry, or maple, ready to be filled with the drivers and crossovers of your choice.

120Hz operation, to remove motion lag in LCD displays, is exploding all over. Olevia's demo was highly effective, showing that its system smoothed motion at various speeds and with a wide variety of program material, including these white bars which scrolled across the screen.

KEF also demonstrated the smallest entry in its Reference series, the 201.2, in 2-channels. It sounded superb. $5000/pair now, going up to $6000/pair soon. Get 'em while they're hot.

The Harmon Specialty Group was demonstrating Levinson's new $30,000 No.502 surround processor together with Lexicon amps and a complete Revel Ultima2 speaker system, the latter anchored by the big Revel Ultima2 Salon2s on the right and left front channels. It sounded outstanding, but this did not surprise me after my recent review of an Ultima2 Studio2 system.

Focal redesigned its Electra series a year or so ago to incorporate the beryllium tweeter originally found in the Utopia series. That revised Electra line remains available, but a new Electra S range makes for a more affordable (though not cheap) Electra package. The prices start at $3495/pair for the bookshelf 1007 S all the way up to $5995/pair for the floor-standing 1027 S. The CC 1000 S center will run you $2295, the SR 1000 S surrounds $3495/pair, and the SW 1000 S sub $2995. The big savings in the S series come from a somewhat less elaborate and expensive cabinet construction and finish, and the substitution of an Aluminum/Magnesium tweeter in place of the beryllium design in the Be range.

The photo here shows the original image on SIM2's LCD local dimming prototype (the quality of the image on the LCD screen, by the way, was far better than this shot). The photo in the next entry shows the backlighting for the same image (I asked SIM2 to freeze the source so you can see what is happening.) More details follow in the next entry.