Wilson Audio’s very impressive Alexia loudspeakers ($48,500/pair) fronted a seriously top-shelf system. Here’s that lineup:
- Spiral Groove SG1.1 with the Centroid arm ($31,000)
- Lyra’s new Etna cartridge ($6995), a medium weight, medium compliance, low-impedance moving coil (.56mV) using trickle-down tech/design from the top-shelf Atlas
- dCS’s Paganini System (SACD player, master clock, upsampler, and DAC) ($55,500)
The big announcement was from VTL, launching their newest stereo amplifier, the S-400 Series II Stereo reference Balanced amplifier ($33,500). A mini Siegfried! I thought it was really impressive looking, and it features a user-adjustable damping feature (varying the negative feedback) to better fit to your loudspeakers. Twelve 6550 or KT88 tubes can crank out a max of 300wpc in tetrode/150wpc in triode.
Other VTL gear included the TL-7.5 Series II preamp ($20,000), and the TP-6.5 phono preamplifier with a SUT phono input ($10,500).
Cables included Transparent Audio’s Opus MM2 Audio Cables ($108,625 /4 pair cables), Nordost Odin and Valhalla Power Cables & Conditioner (8 pieces – $42,850 Nordost), Nordost Odin Digital Cables (5 pieces – $17,500).
