Dan Wright of ModWrightLLC in Portland/Oregon showed a new in-house designed, from-the-ground-up preamp. Called the model SWL 9.0, this stacked two-box affair with outboard power supply uses twin 5687s partially visible through the top chassis and offers four inputs, point-to-point wiring and the expected plethora of designer parts. A larger, quadruple 5687 reference preamp in prototype form was also on display, sporting a choke-filtered power supply with regulation for the filament heaters, Hexfred and Schottky rectifiers and constant current source plate supply. Like Chris Johnson's forthcoming PartsConneXion electronics, ModWright too is now applying its expertise of upgrading and refining other makers' products to its very own products. To avoid confusion, there's also Allen Wright of Vacuum State Electronics, a native New Zealander gone Aussie who finally ended up in Munich/Germany, and George Wright of the Wright Sound Company in Kent/Washington. You can never have too many wrights in audio land's plentiful wrongs.

Tim Ratcliffe of Experience Audio in Premiere Audio's old Seattle location smartly reminded showgoers -- just by virtue of his selection of gear -- that conventional dynamic loudspeakers and high-power push-pull tube amplification continue to enjoy high sonic merit even when, as during VSAC, they were surrounded by hordes of SET and high-efficiency horn aficionados. Call it a subliminal reality check that was pulled off with particular aplomb by his smaller system, anchored with the famous ProAc Response 1S and augmented by TBI's Magellan-su subwoofers. Designed by Jan Plummer of VBT who's recently gone solo, these low-profile subs feature the same now-patented radial transmission line coupled to a vented alignment as the prior VBT Magellan subs upon which we bestowed our Blue Moon Award for speed and finesse. A new crossover and the absence of a low-pass filter in the optional amps now allows use of non-Plummer amplification. A pair of subs and amps is already in-house for a forthcoming review.

This system also featured the mighty TEAC/Esoteric universal player and Audio Research's small integrated amp while the adjacent room used the big-gun ARC amp and Carl Marchisotto's Alon speakers. However, for my personal tastes, this ProAc/TBI system with Grand Prix Audio stand was the stand-out in the 'conventional' class of HiFi at VSAC.

As has happened throughout this report, the Teres Audio room's alphabetical arrival wreaks havoc with my sequencing by including components whose alphabetical turn would have occurred much earlier. To wit, Bolder Cable Company with a whole armada of Bybee-fied Nitro interconnects, speaker cables and interconnect as well as in-line purifiers and more; Radii Audio with its MNP-02 preamplifier [$800] and GS-75PP monoblocks [$2100/pr below]; QSC Audio with its DSP-4 digital signal processor [$685] and DCA-3422 power amplifier [$2,198], VMPS Audio with its 626R speakers [$3,900/pr] using upgraded FST ribbon tweeters, internal SoundCoat applications, Auricap network caps plus their New Larger Subwoofer [$914].

The Teres Audio Model 340 [$6.350] is the king of the Teres turntable heap which starts out with the $1,550 Model 135 in acrylic guise. This transparent theme gets mixed up with wood for the plinth from the Model 150 on up, adds lead-shot filling for the acrylic platter in the Model 160 [$2,175], introduces exotic hardwood for the base in the Models 245 and 255, goes all hardwood for plinth & platter in the Model 275 [$3,750] and finally full-hog, full-mass woody in the depicted statement piece. The folks in this room took room optimization serious, by measuring and controlling the relative monitor/sub network, slope, Q and output values via computer-monitored DSP. Like in the Cain & Cain room, this was another example of "hi-tech meets retro" convergence, exemplifying the credo that a love of the old (tubes, vinyl) shouldn't automatically imply outdated, backwards or not-with-it. Au contraire, mon amis!