CES 2005: Who had the best bang for the buck room?

Star Sound Technology. They used a lot of their accessories, along with their own amp and new speakers. In my opinion they were in the top four for sound at CES and that at a fraction of the Wavac, VTL, and Dali rooms. Amazing, even at the price.

Nrchy, SST sounds very good but remember that they use the dCS source components so this needs to be considered in perspective.

You are right. I guess $20,000 worth of digital could hardly be considered budget. They still had better sound than a lot of higher priced gear. Still a good bang for the buck. I wonder what the total cost of the system was that they were playing?

Gaudio_eek what is your choice, or are you disqualified.

We could have used a $3k turntable, and had better sound, and would have been in a very affordable range, as high end systems go.

However, we realized that most people use CD, and want to hear demos with the format that they most commonly use, so we used a very good digital player.

To demo our products, it only makes sense to use a quality front end, which is the only part of the system that we don't currently manufacture.

Nate, thanks for your vote about the sound quality of our room.
Tom Lyons
Starsound Technologies

I would say a couple rooms impressed me as "best bang for the buck" rooms, both next door to CES at THE Show.

I thought the Consonnance room sounded absolutely fabulous. Their new Eric-1 standmount speakers at $995/pr. paired with their very reasonable priced solid state electronics sounded nothing short of amazing (especially for the money). I bought the Consonance CD-120 demo CD player after hearing the setup... I was *that* impressed.

Their higher-end tube electronics also sounded phenomenal when paired to the VS DB-99 mk II speakers as well.

The other "best bang for the buck room" was Tyler Acoustics. Ty had his Woodmeres, the new Linbrook IIs, and some regular Linbrook Signatures paired with Jolida electronics on display. While I have heard Ty's stuff sound even better than it did at THE Show (in my listening room, for one)... it is hard to find better value for the money on driver cost alone for the speakers (and Jolida offers great bang for the buck as well for the electronics).

---Dave