I loved the system in this room. It was small, it had a great vinyl system, it had SET amps and single-driver speakers with paper cones.
The vinyl system consisted of the TW Acoustic Raven GT turntable ($10,500) with a Schroeder Reference SQ tonearm and a Soundsmith Sussurro fixed-coil cartridge. The other tonearm was a 12” Schick with an Ortofon SPU Royal N cartridge.
The rest of the frontend was designed by Dave Slagle and was an EMIA step-up transformer ($2,700) with an EMIA phono preamp ($15,000), and an EMIA Line Stage – Autoformer with remote volume control ($3,900).
The little black boxes were the power amps from EMIA ($17,500/pair). They were single-ended, direct-heated triode power amps with #50 tubes. They put out around 5 watts. Dave built them, including winding all of the transformers.
Cube Audio Speakers
Maybe the biggest news in this room was that this was the US debut of F8 NEO, the new 8″ flagship full-range driver for Cube Audio ($4,700/pair). This new driver was shown in the Cube Audio Mini Nenuphar speakers ($10,900). I had heard so much about the Cube Audio speakers from others, but I had never heard thought their sound was all that special at other shows. This was not the case here. They sounded splendid!
As a single-driver speaker should be, they were very coherent and exceptionally phase coherent. This enabled me to hear real layering of tone and staging. The sense of purity from these speakers was amazing.
