HE-2007 was held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

Despite what the name implies, this show catered significantly more to the two-channel crowd than it did to the home theater enthusiast. Literally, no display manufacturers and very few rooms had been set up with multi-channel. All-in-all, I thought it was a pretty decent audio show - the Grand Hyatt was a good venue despite the crowded areas at sign-up, and the elevators were quite slow.

This was also the year of the darkened rooms, in fact some even completely turned off the lights while playing just music. Well, that's my excuse for some of the dark images.

Cabasse's La Sphère was one of the many unusual speakers and frankly a bit creepy looking, using Bel Canto equipment the four-way point source system speaker sounded great.

Keeping up with unusual speaker design, the "starting around $80g" Mandarin Supreme from Loiminchay, yup the specialty pen company. The Mandarin included a 19" horn and 10" base woofer.

Sharing a room were Vandersteen speakers, Audio Research components, and Clear Audio turntables. Vandersteen's prototype carbon fiber clad 5A speakers run on Audio Research's Reference 110 amplifier, the Reference 3 preamp, and Reference CD7 player. No pricing on any of the equipment was available, but it sure sounded sweet.

Go to Part II.

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