Audiophiles and iPods are not the best of friends most of the times. But then, time can be a wonderful thing. Time heals wounds and opens new perspectives. Jadis importer Jesper Hansted had brought MSB's iLink to the show as a novelty. The iLink is an upgrade to an iPod by replacing the often dreaded analogue output with digital. Now you can use a far better DAC to further improve the sound quality. Nice you would say. But it gets better. MSB also offers an RF Link. A small RF transmitter is attached to the iLink output of the upgraded iPod and sends the signal to the MSB docking station from whence the signal moves on to your DAC. Imagine Mr. Audiophile -- add reading glasses -- sitting in his hot seat with an iPod containing 80GB of WAV files (or Apple lossless if you prefer), selecting tracks from that spot just using his thumb. Eighty gig means 80-plus full CDs in WAV or about 180 in Apple lossless. The MSB upgrade is only possible with iPods of 30 or 80GB hard disks. Start saving for Santa, kids.

In the Naim room a familiar turntable showed up, a Linn LP12 albeit enhanced by Naim. After Linn decided to go solo, that is sack the Dutch importer, the latter found comfort in the arms of Naim. Funny how the audio world turns at times.

Another first-time exhibitor was Guido Tent of Tentlabs. Guido is well known in the professional studio world and in the DYI market. He is famous for his Tentlabs CD clocks that eliminate jitter almost completely. Now Tentlabs is offering a CD player built to Guido's own references. The player comes as a kit but don't worry. All a new owner has to do is assemble the circuit boards and the player's mechanism. All components are factory mounted already. The mechanical heart of the player is the famous Philips CD Pro drive around which Guido designed his own clock and an I²S interface to the 20-bit converter. This DAC runs in non-oversampling mode and there is no digital filter at the end. We made an appointment with Guido for a review of this interesting system. At the show Guido played his CDP with a private amp design of Bruno Putzeys -- yes, the man behind Kharma's amplifiers, uCD and overall class-D maven extraordinaire -- and a prototype attenuator in-between.

Dutch manufacturer Van Medevoort had his latest Audioart integrated switching amplifiers on display in combination with their hybrid electrostatic loudspeaker. Upon entering the room, we could feel that there was - something. That something appeared as a full installation of Acoustic System resonators. Because quite a few remarks were made about their room's sound quality, father and son Van Medevoort had no complaints about blue tacking the tiny cups to their walls.

Aspera Audio hit the show with two adjacent rooms, this in celebration of two new products they import. First was the new PS Audio Premier power regenerator. This regenerator is not based on switching technologies but compared to previous versions, runs as cool as can be. It remains capable however of putting out 1500 watts of cleaned and voltage-stabilized power. A review of the Premier is in the works. The other news in these rooms was the TW Raven turntable. With a Lyra Titan cartridge, a Tron Seven preamplifier, Kharma Matrix MP 150 power amps and Kharma Mini Exquisites, this room had many returning visitors.

Looking back at a day well spent, we discovered some new technological achievements, heard interesting combinations, had our kidneys realigned at Lyngdorf's o-some organ orgy and met some really nice people. Audio can be great fun.