This is possibly Melbourne's finest penthouse apartment developed by Nicholas Murray architects for a client with an incredible collection of Australian Art that we were commissioned to fit out with a home control system and Audio Visual equipment.

Carlton Audio Visual's Clearance Corner page

It is now amongst us ....

This glorious piece of hewn acrylic is actually made for Marantz by Clearaudio. It has a 3cm thick heavy acrylic platter that runs on a ceramic bearing in a sintered bronze cap. the motor is dampened and isolated from the chassis to prevent any vibrational influence on playback. It comes with an ebony bodied cartridge made for Marantz by Clearaudio.

This much awaited preamp from one of our favourite companies offers an opportunity for the more ardent amongst us to get into surround separates at a very reasonable price.
Surround preamps have always been sought after but handicapped by the economies of scale, perversly a preamp has tended to be much more expensive than an integrated receiver due to the fact that a surround receiver will always sell an order of magnitude more units.
NAD appear to have made the T175 preamp in their inimitable fashion to a price that corresponds to the economies of scale of the mass market receivers but with the quality of separates.Most unusually for a unit at this price point there are slot in upgrade paths available for future audio formats et al. This is normally associated with $8K plus devices like the Arcam AV9 and the Denon AVCA1.
The idea of a separate preamp for surround is that you can have your stereo HiFi freak cake and eat it as well with superlative home Cinema decoding.
Add a multi channel power amp such as NAD's own T975 and you have a theatre system that will reach into the soul of a performance and substantially protect against technological evolution in the market place.

This is one of the coolest of all the on wall keypad audio systems short of Crestron ... but without that price tag. The Mode keypad from Speakercraft has an illuminated rotary control which combined with a scroll key and an LCD display makes it fab for accessing music collections and radio stations. The system has one of the best iPod integration systems and ... coming soon ... will offer an iPhone wireless integration.

Some of us love big speakers here at CAV. Great hulking monoliths (dual-liths?) that thump out sound like some sort of gift from the thunder gods of audio. Unfortunately, that means that space is a bit of a problem in our already bountiful show rooms. So getting a new range of speakers in is quite the commitment, they truly do have to be worth both their floor space and to have a definitive new market place position and sonic character positioning, never mind getting past the gauntlet of our staff’s opinions. We greatly value existing relationships and never lightly unseat a brand from our floor stock inventory to make space for a flashy newcomer. At CAV we have no time for pretty strangers but look for the long term attributes in our brand relations.

The screens are getting two dimensional, Sharp and Panasonic are in a race to build the slimmest most waif like anorexic televisions.

This is a rather nice Sharp LCM3700 pro monitor LCD TV mounted on a rotary pole in one of Melbourne's better apartments. This particular installation is run by a Crestron control system that enables the client to flick imagery and audio seamlessly beetween the various regions of the residence.