LATEST ADDITIONS

Last year, Vaughn Loudspeakers' flagship Plasma Signature towers ($20,000/pair), featuring eight midrange drivers in a bipolar configuration (four front and four rear), a 12" powered subwoofer, and their signature plasma tweeter, were my BIG best-in-show discovery…

Everything matters. Everything is not always necessary, but everything does make a difference….

For those who have been thinking it's time for the people in white coats to carry me away—they actually did.

Impressive bass control and speed on a recording of taiko drums, excellent timbres, and an equally captivating sense of spaciousness on Lyle Lovett's "North Dakota" left no question that this attractive mid-priced system from Paradigm and Anthem would make many an audiophile very, very happy.

Overheard in the hallway:
"Babe, can you please buy me that cable?"
"But I just bought you so much for your birthday…!"
And just like that, day two begins.

Introduced in 1985 as the smallest model in JBL's "Ti" range, the 18Ti ($590/pair) shares with its larger siblings, like the JBL 250ti (recently reviewed by J. Gordon Holt), a high-tech tweeter that uses a one-piece ribbed titanium-foil dome/surround just 25µm thick. This is both rigid and of very low mass, pushing its first-breakup mode up to the region of 30kHz. The tweeter is mounted above the polypropylene-cone woofer, offset a little to one side to make room for the 45mm diameter port (though the speakers are not supplied as a handed pair). The 10-liter internal volume box is well-constructed from 20mm chipboard, covered in real-wood veneer.

Classé Audio's flagship preamplifier, the Six, has enjoyed a five-year life span—quite long for an audiophile component. Company president Glen Grue reports that the Six's sales have continued to improve during that time. How to explain this solid-state preamp's continued success in competition with today's newer, remote-controlled, line-stage preamplifiers?