High-End Audio Gear the Big Noise at Vegas Electronics Show

By Martha McKay, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.

Jan. 11–LAS VEGAS — Forget the robotic vacuum cleaners and wireless doorbells.

There’s a place at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show where you can be transported by sound.

Hundreds of makers of high-end audio equipment, including a number from North Jersey, set up shop in Las Vegas for the week to hawk their ultra-sophisticated wares.

One such audio nut is Peter Bizlewicz, a lanky music-lover who holds four U.S. patents and runs Symposium USA in Wayne. Like many audiophiles, it’s all about perfecting the gear that turns analog or digital signals into sound waves.

“As the state-of-the-art has progressed with audio, smaller and smaller differences become perceptible,” said Bizlewicz, who likes to quote novelist Jorge Luis Borges and has dedicated his career to audio engineering.

The New Jersey inventor brought his latest creation to the show — a pair of $60,000 speakers that come equipped with things like neodymium magnets and precision-machined aircraft aluminum. On the Internet

Here are some North Jersey audio companies and their Web sites:

–Symposium symposiumusa.com

–Hudson Audio Imports hudsonaudioimports.com

–Tact Audio tactaudio.com

For general audio information: greataudio.com

To a non-audiophile like myself, “proprietary aperiodic loading port coupled with staggered driver placement” doesn’t make much sense. So I turned to some expert help.

Audio reviewer Larry Cox, who was scoping out the speaker line-ups, told me, “Just sit in the magic seat.” That, he explained, is simply the seat near the center of the room where you can hear the speakers at their best. Cox came equipped with his own music to use as a reference, and Bizlewicz obliged, popping a Pepe & The Bottle Blondes disc into the player.

The small room filled with some toe-tapping Latin tunes and Bizlewicz’s speakers transported me. The music sounded superb.

Similar scenes were being played out all throughout the enormous hallways of the Venetian Hotel. This was truly the world of the discriminating music junkie.

“I know a [reviewer] who says he wants the treble like needles into his eyes,” said a laughing Cox, who writes audio reviews for a Web site called positive-feedback.com and works a day job in California as a lawyer to pay his bills.

Music lovers are in search of images, Cox said. They want a system to sound so good that you can imagine where the bass player was sitting. And every aspect of the audio gear is scrutinized.

Cox, for instance, bought his cables and turntable from Tom Hills, owner of Hudson Audio Imports in Closter.

Hills and his wife, Joanne, run their small business importing high-end turntables from countries such as Germany. Most use thick, heavy cylinders of acrylic that help keep a spinning record (yes, that’s record as in the old groovy type) from vibrating too much. He also makes his own cables — the experts say the type of cable material and even the twist of the metallic fiber can affect the quality of the sound.

Bizlewicz lugged his $60,000 speakers all the way to Vegas in hopes of attracting dealers looking to sell to the wealthy audio fanatic. He says he makes a living, but building high-end speakers is, in some senses, a labor of love.

“We do this because we have a passion for music,” he said.

Down the hallway, another group of music lovers clustered into a room to listen to a pair of $2,500 Usher speakers, model EB-178, small enough to sit on a shelf with the kind of sound that filled the room.

They didn’t match Bizlewicz’s, of course — even I could tell the difference. But the sound was big. Another reviewer popped his own disc into the Usher system and nodded appreciatively as the small speakers handled the bass well.

Tact Audio of Little Ferry was on hand with its latest in high-performance audio gear, the Tact RCS2.2xp, a pre-amplifier with dynamic room correction.

Cox may have put it best when he said:

“To me the whole point is to be emotionally engaged [by the music] either because it sounds like a live event or you hear that odd harmony that just somehow melts you.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.

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