Sally Jeung and Harry Lee had their new Aurender N10 music player which they feel has upped performance unreasonably close to their flagship. Bryan Stanton of the eponymous J.B. Stanton PR agency was in attendance just then. He let slip that he'd recently visited Nelson Pass in his now permanent SeaRanch digs and found the man in rude health ready for many more years of inventive engineering. Brilliant news! Back to Aurender, I asked Harry whether there were good technical reasons why audiophile servers all rely on WiFi for content navigation to offer no wired versions. He said no. But he also quipped that I was the only one he knew of who wanted a wired or IR/RF remote. No demand, no supply. I get it. Still, I keep buggering on about it.

Auris Audio from Serbia who'd landed with a bang last year had gone poisonous for a change. Incite the Paracelsus dictum that "poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison". The implied meaning must be that at the proper dose, a poison becomes medicine whereas medicine at the wrong dosage gets toxic. The new Auris Poison range promises the perfect dose of tube poison to heal, not make you sick. This smaller system with WIM speakers sounded really good!

Here's a closer look at the lineup from the front...

... and a final glance at the central preamp. With Trafomatic Audio absent at this event, the Auris poison hung the Serbian flag most proud. So I signed up for a review of these compact but sonically potent black blocks.