My old friend Eric Bosley (a long time industry professional) is working with Future Ready Solutions. They are better known for their Perfect Path HDMI cables, but also have Kordz, Clear Line Celebrity and Perfect Waves cable lines.
Chris Kane, VP of Sales & Marketing of Audio Control was showing off their Architect Model 2660. Chris claims there are no other power amplifier on the market like it today. It boasts both analog & digital inputs, with 16 channels of true RMS power at 65 watts into 8 Ohms, 100 watts into 4 Ohms. Designed to also be bridged as a high-power 8 channel amplifier at 175 watts per channel, the Architect Model 2660 leads the way in power, flexibility & performance.
The Architect Model 2660 has been exclusively created for the residential and professional custom integrator, and benefits from a high resolution S/PDIF digital audio input with an integrated Wolfson 32-192 KHz, 16/24 bit depth DAC.
Jeff Davis of Polk Audio was showing their version of the DTS Play Fi High Res open platform. He talked about their new updated app for Android and Apple platforms. Also, they are working with Fusion Research out of Silicon Valley. They have been developing advanced control and integration for the DTS platform of multi room audio. Jeff also mentioned that they offer two rooms of audio and a sound bar for home theater for under $700 which he pointed out was hundreds less than Sonos for the same capability. Plus he added, “with better performance as well.”
I was happy to see Tannoy was showing off some of their new speakers. Founded in 1926, Tannoy will be celebrating their 90th anniversary next year. Although they are not the oldest speaker manufacturer they are the oldest continuously operating speaker company. World War II caused an interruption in Bang and Olufsen’s production or they couldn’t claim that honor.
Sitting next to Tannoy was Cabasse, a company based in France that is known for their point source speaker line. Keith Haas (from Integra/Cabasse/Esoteric) showed me Cabasse’s very beautiful Riga Model which is a 2 way phase-coherent point source speaker. What makes this speaker stand out is Cabasse was able to physically align both the voice coils for the woofer and tweeter for precise phase accuracy. This little jewel sells for $12,000 per pair.
There were several tables of what I refer to as Nuts and Bolts. Important auxiliary products to an installer, but not the type of things that the average person has any interest in. I will only show some pics, but not comment on the tables.
If you recall I mentioned Speakercraft earlier. They were showing off their new Profile Series 2 Line Array speakers. Line Array speakers traditionally have been used in pro-sound for sound reinforcement. The advantages according to Speakercraft is that by incorporating multiple tweeters in a line array, the “AIM Series 2 delivers focused high frequencies farther into the listening area than standard tweeter configurations so that listeners may enjoy a larger sweet spot.”
Speakercraft was also showing their new Speakercraft MRA-664, a whole home audio controller that delivers up to half a dozen unique music sources for amazing sound in every room of the house. This MRA is the first to integrate multi-room audio along with home theater control in a way that is simple to set up and brilliant to listen to. A job that might have once required hours of programming has been distilled down to a simple execution. And, for larger homes, two MRAs can be paired to create a six-source, 12-zone system. That means 12 rooms with music porting into each of them. They also showed a supper thin FR1 Seamless flat speaker. It is not available yet, but should be soon.
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