Too many variables must be factored in to determine what makes a great show, but - whatever the formula - the return of the Stereophile-sponsored Home Entertainment Show to New York exhibited all of them. And New York itself is a BIG part of the package. In what other city on earth could you make dinner plans the night before the show, only to have them messed up by a triple homicide at the restaurant you've chosen? Where but in New York could you play an obscure, mono Mickey Katz CD and have half the visitors in the room singing along...verbatim? Like Ol' Blues Eyes sang, so good they had to name it twice.

And the show team rose to the challenge of re-launching an event which had skipped a couple of years but making it a magnet for the industry. Yes, you guessed it: this show was a major battlefield for SACD vs DVD-A, with both camps holding press conferences and coming up with enough new discs to ensure that public and press had no doubt that the new formats are 'for real'. But there were contrasts. Warner Music dragged out three legendary producers, who inadvertently proceeded to show us exactly why multi-channel remastering of two-channel material should NOT be undertaken. What was done to classics from Neil Young, Van Morrison and Fleetwood Mac - aaah, faggeddaboudit. They're gonna do it anyway.

Conversely, Telarc showed what a class act it is by re-recording - not just remastering - the legendary 1812 Overture, a famed audiophile speaker buster (with the original cannon!), for release in both formats. The company demonstrated the various technologies at a special demonstration at Lyric hi-fi, on a system using five Magnepan speakers. Along with some Chesky efforts, we can at last compare SACD and DVD-A. And as for the multi-channel re-release of Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue...

High points of the show included a steady flow of seminars and Q&A sessions, plenty of free live music during the day and - best of all live concerts by the legendary David Johansen and Keb' Mo', sponsored respectively by Chesky records and Sony Music. On the hardware side, despite the Americans preferring to launch everything at CES in January, there were plenty of cool new toys, not least being a pair of stunning plasma screens from Runco.

Since the show was structured to include a 'headphone room', there was an opportunity to hear prototypes of Grado's new 'Home Theater Surround' headphones, used in conjunction with Dolby and Panasonic hardware, and which go some way to resolving the issue of listening to 5.1 material on cans, at night when your family would rather sleep. Also seen was Wheatfield Audio's USB-1 Computer DAC/Headphone Amp, which allows you to access sound from your computer via a USB output, along with the company's all-balanced headphone amplifiers, valve headphone amps and more. The room was a hoot: in the centre was a massive, active display of headphone amps and headphones so you could try them without queuing.

Bent Audio, regrettable name aside, showed a truly ingenious passive pre-amp, fully modular and with remote control, with a series of plastic rods rising from the chassis and glowing pale blue according to playback level. Think of it as a 3D bar graph.

Valve amps were all over the show, with the hyper-active Legend - I love their clever approach to the tube cage dilemma - releasing the $6500-per-pair Nirvana monoblocks, good for 2x100W from four 6550s. More than one person sent me to hear the very sweet yet robust Tenor OTL amplifiers, looking very Italianate with their wooden chassis, the star being 75 monoblocks using four Russki 6C33C triodes per channel. AudioValve showed its biggest amp yet, the Challenger 400 monoblock good for 300W from 12 beam power pentodes such as KT88s or 6550s. It sounded superb through Alon's top speakers. Speaking of speakers, truncated pyramids seem to be back in fashion, with two of the shows nicest discoveries being the Florence Pololena - small but sounding like a massive floorstander - and the Talon Khorus, with novel loading in the form of an 'exhaust port' at the back.

VAC expanded the flagship line to include the Renaissance Signature 70/70, a 70W/ch dual mono amplifier, with eight 300Bs and a nice round meter to monitor tube condition; it's also available as a 140W monoblock. And one of the sleepers of the show was so prosaically styled that it might have been ignored, but fans of Japanese valve artistry should make a note of the Kore-Eda Laboratory 2658B monoblock power amp with 300Bs delivering 18W in push-pull array

New front ends of interest included 47 Laboratory's ultra-'ironic' Model 4704 PiTracer CD transport - a CD player which looks like a record deck. Creek arrived with a new top-end player, the CD53 compact disc player, with 24/192 DAC and Philips CDM12 transport, and - too gorgeous for words! - the prototype of Oracle's new CD1500, to appear as both player and transport.

A good show? No, a great one - because the vibe alone proved that the high end isn't dead, audiophiles still burst with enthusiasm and the industry hasn't run out of ideas. I loved every minute of it.