T.H.E. Show Newport Beach California. 1st, 2nd and 3rd June 2012

Pardon my brevity- but you’re here for the gear pron right? And there’s plenty of that! T.H.E Show Las Vegas 2013 here

Concert Fidelity and Estelon

Joseph Audio speakers showing off the Lynx HiLo USB ADC/DAC

Rather handy for vinyl archiving eh?

Bob’s Devices Phono Stepups

Bob with his Devices. They seem to be well thought out and he’s getting custom iron for them.

Kimber Kable had their usual excellent displays, but the WBT NextGen binding posts were very nice.

Pass Labs Driving Sony

Sony did a nice job on traditional plywood cabinetry, very solid.

Isomike was showing with Sony and Pass as well.

Isomike also had some pretty Dynaudios.

A couple of the Legacy models- lot of speaker!

Lot of ‘em!

Ayon Audio from Australia

Lumen Whites with um…. Luminous lights…

Venture showed several of their models, of note was the wide variety and the use of a 2” cone midtweeter

Venture also had their line of amps

MBL sounding nice

Magico Q3

Soundsmith showing their Hyperion cartridge with a cactus needle cantilever

More MBL

Closeup of MBL’s omni radiators

Scaena had their arrays, each enclosure separate. Neat!

Episode audio has their midtweet array designed to act as a point source

Napa Acoustic showing with their cute little 25WPC integrated and some cool room treatments

Essentially a speaker grille suspended on pegs over a section of acoustic pyramid foam with a backer board. Light enough to mount like a picture frame.

Audio Engine was showing their monitor speakers and digital connectivity solutions. Good stuff.

Thiel had their very cool 3.7 showing.

Audreal’s PA-80 looking nice topless

Fritz Speakers with Zesto

Von Gaylord speakers and amps

Evolution Audio and DartZeel

Sanders Sound Systems Electrostats

Some Schitt

More Schitt

Tannoy and Cary

Full Emotiva Lineup

Amphion Waveguided speakers with Hegel electronics

RSL Speaker Systems had an impressive setup with very small mains and a nice sub with what appears to be a quite nice woofer.

Wyred 4 Sound

Wyred 4 Sound had a nice mini music server, with internal hard disks that would auto-rip from CDs inserted in front. Very elegant solution.

Emerald Physics was showing their near-nude Coax setup

Induction Dynamics S1.8T sounded nice.

Sonorus and their big stats

Sonorus had their own Reel-To-Reel setup

YG and SimAudio

TAD, Wywire, and Zesto

Coincident had an elegant look to it, didn’t get a good listen.

Nola’s KO is a short midtweet array, open baffle.

George Warren Turntable… purdy!

Atohm had very decent sound going on

Eficion’s F250 had a rounded bottom end…..

Needs no introductions right? Wilson Sophia 3s

Dynaudio looking elegant

Eficion also had their larger F300

Naim Electronics… lost my notes on the speakers

Sonist Speakers with Audion, Synergistic, and XLO

Acoustic Zen, Triode Corp, ORB

Modwright, Deadalus, Wywire. Cool shaping on the speaker’s fronts!

EAR

ESS Heil with a couple prototypes and a production model

What the…. Interesting! Minisize AMT1s!

KEF’s Blade speaker- opposed quad of woofers… I like it already! And a midtweet coax. Pretty nice stuff.

THE Show Newport Beach, East (Atrium Hotel)

A little more time passed between my west writeup and the east, and so I took a little more time this go-round to give a little more gear info and insight- still a fast-moving pic-intensive coverage, if you like your hifi chatty, this ain’t the writeup for you!

Brooks Berdan had Sumiko (they distribute Sonus Faber) with Musical Surroundings, Grand Prix Audio, and Cardas cabling. Very nice sound in this room, best I’ve heard S.F. sound.

The Digital Ear had BIG Martin Logan Electrostats combined with McIntosh- The combination of curved and flat stators was an interesting detail.

A big line of Macs- Can you dig it?

The Audio Salon had Magico, Constellation Audio, MIT, and smooth tunes

Brooks Berdan with Wilson, VTL, DCS, Cardas, and Grand Prix Audio

Kubotek had their hornloaded speakers looking as smooth as ever

Audience had bipolar arrays with passive radiators, and smooth curvy cabinets, using short arrays of their small fullrange speakers

Motus was showing their underhung driver lineup- nice toys here, made to compete with higher end drivers like Scan Speak.

Not surprisingly, these guys get 2 pics. What can I say, I am a driver hound.

Precision Transducer Engineering did some good stuff in… big packages. Cool active electronics with very low noise, and big ballsy sound.

Audio Note UK

AAudio Imports had BMC Speakers with Stage III and Tandem

The BMCs were bipoles using AMT style tweeters in an MTM layout.

With opposed woofers and a nice-looking crossover, a pretty elegant overall design

Dynamic Design driven by ModWright

Those ModWright covers look nice

Teresonic had their curvy speakers running with the help of Musical Surroundings.

Eddie Current’s headphone amps… and a heck of a cool name.

Chapman driven by Cary and wired by MIT.

Angel City Audio driven by Melody Valve Hifi with Wywire

YG Acoustics speakers powered by MSB

Burmester with Genesis

Heed, Profundo, Blackbird, the ever-stylish Viva amps, and Transformation

More of the above!

Acapella with Einstein, rocking the shipping crate rack. To be fair, they seem like excellent shipping crates.

Empirical Audio had all manner of digital and electronic goodies with an eye towards computer audio, all played back through the very competent TAD speakers.

High Water Sound had Cessaro speakers, TW Acoustic, and Silent Running Audio. Lovely horns and enclosures on these very fine speakers.

Korato showed with the well-constructed B&Ws

The Korato CDP was visually unique- and in a much nicer way than the free-flying wires sticking out of my preamp at the moment!

Records WOW Vintage

Wow Vintage Records

Records Wow Vintage

Audeze had their wood-bodied phones on hand, with nice cloth pads. Seem very comfy!

SimpliFi Audio with Bladelius, DSPeaker, Gradient speakers, PSI Audio, and Klangwerk.

A well run show with lots of cool toys- wish I’d had more time. Until next time!

T.H.E. Show Coverage by Jeff Poth of www.EnjoyTheMusic.com

The Hifi Pig team would like to give a massive “thankyou” to the team at Enjoy The Music for their kind permission to use their photographs and words. We will reciprocate later in the year with the Paris Show.