CES 2011 Coverage

January 10, 2011

Kimber IsoMike

Of all the rooms, the sound in this one impressed me the most. The set up was a Sony Sonoma DSD digital audio workstation playing back the feed from Ray Kimber’s 4-mic IsoMike array without any compression, limiting, EQ or other recording engineer funny business to EMM Labs DSD DACs, a pair of synced EMM Labs Pre2 preamps, and a pair of Pass Labs X350.5 stereo amplifiers to two pairs of Sony SS-AR1 loudspeakers ($20,000/pair) via Kimber cables. The recording of solo piano was as life-like as I have heard, which is no small trick given the frequency and dynamic range of the piano. It gets my vote as Best of Show, for whatever that is worth. And they weren’t trying to sell anything other than superb recordings at a significant discount.