Outlaw was primarily showcasing their new processor, the Model 990. The
unit has a very impressive feature set for the price and sounded excellent
when paired with an Outlaw Model 770 amplifier and an Atlantic Technology
8200 speaker system.
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Outlaw also talked about a number of new products in
development and a few of these were on static display. |
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The first of these is their so called “Retro Receiver”, the RR 250.
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This unit is just now going into beta testing. Outlaw also
discussed their new subwoofer, the LFM-2 a $299 8” sub designed by Dr.
Poh Hsu. Finally, Outlaw was also showing a receiver for “less than $1000”
although other significant details weren’t mentioned. |
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Ray Kimber was demonstrating a number of his Isomike recordings using a very
impressive system of four TAD Model Ones, vertically bi-amped by four Pass
Labs X350s. The source was a hard drive feeding DSD to a Meitner front
end. The Isomike system used for the recordings consists of four
omni-directional microphones sitting on the corners of a four foot square,
but separated by baffles. Ray took the time to really show off what he was
trying to capture in the recordings by switching speakers on and off so
you could really hear what each channel was contributing to the mix. He
played an interesting mix of choral and wind ensemble works all
recorded at Weber State University. The end results were some fantastic
sounding demos that had a very realistic live presence. |
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HP had their slick new media center PCs and
a nice new 1080p DLP TV. The TV had the interesting design feature that
puts all of the inputs that are normally on the back panel, facing forward behind a drop down
panel on the front of the display.
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The cables still need to be routed to the back of the display, but this
seems to be an interesting design idea. |
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Runco was exhibiting with Kaleidescape and was using an interesting
motorized anamorphic lens on their projector. The lens takes a standard
16:9 image and stretches it to 2.35:1. It was especially cool since the Kaleidascape has the aspect ratio stored with the DVD information and
would automatically switch the setting on the projector and the masking on
the screen when necessary. |
Joseph Audio and Manley Labs showed off a great sounding three-channel
setup designed to take advantage of reissues of some
classic Mercury and RCA recordings that were actually originally recorded
in three-channel sound. The system consisted of Joseph Audio RM55 main
speakers and a center channel version of their top of the line Joseph Pearl.
A full complement of Manley electronics was on hand to back it up. Their
demo gets my vote for the most entertaining at the show, from the killer
three-channel stuff to the hilarious Stan Freberg rendition of "Day-O", it
was just plain fun. |
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TI demonstrated a 67” 1080p DLP RPTV made by Samsung versus the 70” 1080p
Qualia 006 RPTV by Sony. On video material the sets looked very similar in
detail, but definitely had very different color renditions, particularly
on flesh tones. Using a zone-plate pattern the sets showed similar
horizontal resolution, but the Sony showed slightly more vertical
resolution. However, the Sony also showed significantly more aliasing.
Finally, when displaying MS Word, the Sony had an odd ringing around
text, whereas the Samsung displayed text very clearly. Overall, both sets
looked great, and at $6,000 the Samsung will definitely be an interesting
product when it becomes available this summer. |
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