A few things stood out in the Gingko Audio room, and by “stood out”, I mean, “tugged on my pants-leg and begged for attention”.
The first was the honkin’ speaker cables from DanaCable. They are, in a word, Giganotosaurus. And by that, I mean, huge. 4AWG at 3m will set you back $6,500 — just plan on having some friends handy to help you lay them out. Holy mackerel.
The second thing that stood out, for me, was the LampizatOr Big 7 DAC ($11,500). This monster is one of the most expensive to come out of Lukasz Fikus’ “From Warsaw, with love” brand, and it’s a brand that I’ve been particularly enamored with over the last few years. Fully capable of decoding PCM files up to and including files sampled at 384kHz, a $500 upgrade adds a fully-separate and fully-native DSD decoding solution. That latter bit may well be the most natural-sounding decode I’ve ever heard (and more on that, soon). Duelund CAST caps, with EML 45 tubes and Russian 5C3S rectifiers with dual-mono power … yeah, it’s a big list of stuff. I want one. Really, really want one.
Not to be outdone, Wells Audio showcased the new Innamorata Signature stereo amplifier here ($13,000). More Duelund CAST caps, cryo’d trannies, and IPC Energy Booster and more Bybee purifiers round out the improvements. This all adds up to 150wpc into 8Ω and 220 into 4Ω, 50kΩ input impedance, with an SNR of -103dB.
I’ve never seen or heard the Gingko Audio ClaraVu 7 Mk 3 loudspeakers ($8,995) before, so I can’t really pull apart what was doing what in here, but the overall sound was tonally dense, with good range.
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