McIntosh has returned to their past and is releasing a new Turntable
(MT1D).
This is a great looking unit and remains true to the McIntosh design.
This particular one is a pre-production unit and there are still some color and
lighting tweaks to work out. We had a discussion on vinyl at dinner last
night. Piero seemed to believe the re-kindling of vinyl was a reaction
to MP3. We all disagreed and felt it was the handling and caring for the
music on the vinyl that provided a more religious experience to music
listening. That experience just isn’t found in the world of
I-Pods and so we are drawn back towards vinyl. Regardless, if I were to
start to rebuild my vinyl collection this turntable is the one I want.
The retail for this unit should by around $8k when it ships in January.
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Ahhh tubes, I love tubes… I love how they sound, I love how they look
and most of all I love the fact only a few of us use them making our
systems unique. The McIntosh C2300 is an impressive looking unit which includes a
tube based photo stage. The tubes are of course user serviceable by
removing the top cover making tube rolling possible and a lot of fun.
The C2300 is shipping now with a retail of $6000.
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The McIntosh
VP1000 video processor is a new venture under the McIntosh name.
It has more inputs than most of the other video processors we have seen
and while it doesn’t support 1080p on the output side it does both
upscale and downscale analog and digital signals.
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Marantz is refreshing there receiver line with the SR-8002 and SR-7002 models.
Both are THX Select 2 certified, have HDMI v1.3 and support DTS-HD and
Dolby TrueHD.
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The new Marantz remote (RC9001) is the first Marantz programmable remote to
support bi-directional communications. They demoed the unit accessing an
I-Pod doc and one of their SR series receivers. The color screen looked
great and the area around the directional buttons served as a jog wheel…
It also supports IR, RF and Wifi as communications protocols. Very cool.
It also has a slightly different version of the Wizz editor that support
Vista. MSRP is a pricey $1599.
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B&W CT8.4 and CT7.4 LCRS Speakers.
Notice the color of the Kevlar woofers. Every since B&W pioneered yellow
drivers years ago every other speaker manufacture has managed to copy
them. Well B&W has changed the playing field by coloring them blue so to
speak. Both models are featured in black and sell for $4000 and $1000
respectively.
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Classé has caught up with the reset of the processors in terms of HDMI.
The SSP-800 which will ship in the somewhat near future will support
HDMI 1.3 with 4 inputs and 2 outputs. It will support OSD on all video
signals including 1080p and will support 36-bit color. While it will not
support scaling of the video signals it will switch them and pull off
the audio which is the part we consider to be the most important. And it
keeps the cool screen in the front. |