Coolest thing as far as end I saw at AES has to be the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor. The thing is massive at 5u with these giant bakelite knobs and big ol' vu meters with an engraved faceplate for what they call their "1936 aesthetic" Basically - the thing is big but looks really freakin cool. The insides were very impressive looking with nice looking point to point wiring and hand wound custom designed trannys. all hand built.
Since there isn't any info on it in their website -
http://www.shadowhillsindustries.com - about it yet I'll paraphrase from the brochure:
Two comps in series: 1st is an optical comp/limiter using a T4B electro-optical attenuator (like the ones in the LA2). 2nd in series is a class A discrete VCA with 6 position switch for attack, 5 position for release, and 4 position switch for ratio. Each compressor section or side can be bypassed - and the optical and VCA sections each have their own threshold controls. There are seperate knobs for every control for both sides. It can operate as dual mono or linked stereo.
Now here's one of the coolest parts: there are 3 - count em, three - completely different output transformers set for completely different characters which you can switch easily from and even set different for each side (which could be cool if you used this as an M/S processor).
It goes for $4000 (which seems like a serious bargain looking at what was in it) although stock the makeup gain and the threshold knobs are not detented (which was the one thing I didn't like about it on my initial impression) - but the designer (forgot his name - seemed a like pretty young guy but also seemed sharp as a tack) told me they could probably make these detented for not that much more.
Talking with them it could be a wait to get one - but it's being distributed by Vintage King Audio -
http://www.vintageking.com - who I've received excellent service from in the past (they're the folks I got my Medici from).
Biggest part - how does it sound??? Heck if I know as they really didn't have a way of demoing it - and even if they had the AES floor is a horrible place to make an evaluation - but I'm definitely going to talk to the Vintage King folks early next year about getting my hands on one to demo.
I spent a bunch of time checking out the Legendary Masterpiece with Billy Stull giving me the full tour and got to say he was one of the nicest people I've met with a real great and refreshing enthusiam for the gear and audio - even all the way at the end of the day right before the convention closed which is the time I stopped by. The eq in it looks mighty cool with a ton of optional center freq's - kind of looked like a Medici on steroids with the familiar "sheen" and "glow" buttons as options on the shelves . The option to have either the "classic" Neve or "tape" saturation elements applied to just one area of the freq spectrum looks way cool, and there's a nice insert section so you can integrate the rest of your gear (and even use it to sidechain to the built in comps, or use the Masterpieces filters so that you only effect part of the spectrum with your outboard also). The "ambience" control seems interesting also. I expressed my wanting a number of things different - i.e. the ranges of the HPF's and LPF's on the stock unit would be totally useless to me - and it is indeed hard for me to get around input output attenuators aren't deteneted, and yeah, I'd like a mono switch on it somewhere - but Billy let me know that getting it modded and customized is definitely possible. Of course $19g's is a hefty price tag - but it definitely looks a lot more interesting than some other posters have made it out to be. Billy let me know that there is a company you can get financing for it through that will be linked from their site soon.
Other things of interest:
The Benchmark ADC-1 looks like it could be pretty darned cool - stepped input attentuator that you can also bypass if you like to go to a calibrated input level set by front pane trim pot, goes up to 192kHz, has dual simultaneous outputs to AES and spdif including optional src for one of them. At $1700 looks like a pretty cool option to check out.
Also briefly stopped by the Digital Audio Denmark booth and their new AX24 converter looks pretty cool - DXD, DSD, 2x DSD or 24bit PCM up to 384kHz. Forgot to ask the price though.
Best regards,
Steve Berson