Cessaro's wooden hornspeakers with separate direct-radiator bass arrays sounded very good this year but something about their tweeters still isn't 100% perfected. How about those beautifully sculpted scatterers behind the rack - could your significant other live with those? If not, Munich had other options we'll still get to.


The other Sonus Faber is likely how most people outside Italy relate to Chario. Just because both companies love wood of course doesn't mean they're related, sonically or otherwise.


For hi-tech appearance -- remember, I wasn't sitting down to listen -- little competes with Chord Electronics Ltd. from the UK. Unlike their hair shirt brethren with the sparsely featured integrateds, these Brits explore the other direction. And do not confuse them with the cable Chord Company, also from the green isle.


Just because their new Indigo Advanced D-to-A Converter sports an iPod cradle doesn't mean it's not bristling with latter-day tech. In this case, it's called FPGA or field-programmable gate arrays. The Xilinx Spartan 3 employed by the Indigo and stable-mate QBD76 runs 1.25 million gates for "undreamt capability just a few short years ago". Standard silicon chips used by competitors, so Chord, have a gate count on the order of only 30,000. Enter gate envy to your list of audiophile malaises now. A Chord White Paper by Robert Watts and John Franks makes interesting reading on why higher sampling rates sound better - not for audibility of ultrasonic information but for improved timing of transients. "Since transients can be detected down to microseconds, the recording system needs to resolve timing of one microsecond, implying sampling of 1MHz." 44.1kHz is deemed sufficient if the FIR filters have infinite long tap lengths. The largest commercial device runs 256 taps. "Going from 256 taps to 2048 gives a massive improvement in sound quality."


"With the superior capacity of the Spartan 3, four 70-bit DSP cores have allowed tap length increases to 18432 with 18 separate DSP cores within the complete configuration, giving a DSP rate of 2120 MIPS." And so on. It gets technical quickly and thus gobblygook for most of us civilians. What concerns us is socketry. Here we get 2 x 75-ohm BNC, 2 x XLR, 2 x Toslink, 1 x USB B-type, 1 x Bluetooth, 1 x iPod and 1 x wireless iPod, all of them switchable digital inputs. The RAM buffer can be set to min, max or off, there's an absolute polarity inversion switch - and seriously ambitious specs. "Inspired by the very latest images from ultra high-end car manufacturers' assemblies", Chord has also issued the new Invicta trim below.


Copulare is invested in similar styling exercises for equipment supports and uses an 'artificial coral' compound for the resonance-attenuating business. Domestic competitor Finite Elemente too had news words on the subject.