Design 5, Connected Home Media

In this modest room, tucked away at the end of a corridor, we got our first taste of the most impressive speaker setup of the show. To our absolute amazement, it was also the cheapest speaker at the show. It was the Era Design 5.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s folly, you might say, to even begin to equate a relatively inexpensive bookshelf speaker with, say, that monstrous $50,000 behemoth downstairs that made Louis Armstrong sound alive and well and right beside us, singing lovingly just for the benefit of our ears. And I’ll admit that knowing the pricing structure of the Era Design 5 system influenced my judgment. How could it not? I’d spent the day in dreamland, listening to speakers that I knew I would never own or even think about owning. My day at the festival was supposed to be only a lark, a way to fantasize and, at most, check out where we were in the evolution of speaker technology. I never would have imagined that the show would feature a system that not only incorporated top-tier engineering and craftsmanship but also fit in my budget.

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