Premiere Design

<A href="http://www.nbscables.com">NBS</A> is perhaps best known for high-end cables&#151;its URL is nbscables.com, after all&#151;but this American boutique audio company also makes a few unusual speakers and electronic components. I'm especially intrigued by the Universal Power Amplifier (UPA), a unique monoblock that is truly universal in design and operation.

Among the maladies to which music lovers are especially susceptible, hearing damage caused by prolonged exposure to loud sounds is perhaps the most pernicious. When you're young, you normally don't think about the consequences of cranking up the volume, but if you do that routinely, you are sure to suffer some form of hearing deficit in your later&#151;or, in some cases, not so later&#151;years.

Most home-theater geeks prefer to buy separate components in order to optimize the performance of each one and allow them to be swapped out independently for repair or upgrade. But what if you don't have enough space to accommodate all those separate devices? <A href="http://www.usa.denon.com">Denon</A>'s answer is the new S-5BD, which combines a full-featured Blu-ray player and AVR into one compact package.

Horn speakers have been around almost since the invention of electrical-to-mechanical transducer technology, and they still enjoy widespread use today, especially in commercial cinemas. But cinema speakers use horns that limit the vertical dispersion of their sound, whereas circular horns used by a few high-end speaker manufacturers radiate sound in a spherical pattern. Among the proponents of this approach is German maker <A href="http://www.acapella.de/en/">Acapella</A>, which introduced a new model to its lineup at CES, the High Violoncello II, which, like all Acapella products, is distributed in North America by <A href="http://www.aaudioimports.com">Aaudio Imports</A>.

It seems as if high-end iPod docks are all the rage these days. Take, for example, the Art.Station from the <A href="http://www.dwcollection.com">David Wiener Collection</A>.

Among the myriad speakers introduced at CES were three new additions to the Sage Series from <A href="http://www.wisdomaudio.com">Wisdom Audio</A>. All three&#151;L150m, L100m, and C150m center-channel&#151;are on-wall models based on Wisdom's planar-magnetic, line-array design and intended to be placed behind an acoustically transparent projection screen.

Way back in 1999, <A href="http://www.stereophile.com/integratedamps/1299manley/"><I>Stereophile</I> reviewed the Manley Laboratories Stingray 2-channel tube-based integrated amp</A>, whose shape inspired the late, great J. Gordon Holt, the magazine's founder, to suggest its name. Now, 10 years later, <A href="http://www.manleylabs.com">Manley Labs</A> has replaced the original Stingray with the Stingray iTube, which improves various elements and adds an iPod dock.