LATEST ADDITIONS

Way back in the age when Stereophile's print magazine was the size of a theater playbill, common wisdom declared that the tube preamp was the ideal complement to solid state amplification.

Costing just $899, Shanling's top-loading ET3 CD transport appears to have been designed by people who recognize the multitude of big and small fails (or lost opportunities) of previous CD transports. In use, the ET3 felt like a distillation of what I've always wanted in a transport: strong, solid, compact, cool-looking, and feels good to use.

German speaker and electronics manufacturer MBL Akustikgeräte has been acquired by MBL International GmbH, a new subsidiary of China’s Chow Tai Seng. MBL says the deal secures the company’s long-term future and is a step toward resolving ongoing insolvency proceedings.

At 1am on September 17, 2005, Adam Wexler’s phone broke through his snores. He silenced the call and rolled over. Four hours later, the insistent ring jolted him awake. “When Ray, an amazing man who oversees the pier and runs everything around here, called me at 1am, I ignored it,” Wexler recalled, “though fire did cross my mind, because this space is entirely timber. Then my employee Robert Kapszewicz called, and I went to the warehouse at 5:30am.”

Every product listed here has been reviewed in Stereophile. Within each category, products are listed by class; within each class, they're in alphabetical order, followed by their price, a review synopsis, and a note indicating the issues in which the review, and any subsequent follow-up reports, appeared.

It takes audacity for a company that already builds one of the finest DACs on the planet, which is already expensive, to set out to build one that's so much better that it warrants an extra digit in the model number and a much higher price tag. But then CH Precision has never lacked audacity.

This month's Re-Tales takes us to Toronto again—though it's quite a different story than the one we told last month, in a different part of Toronto.