LATEST ADDITIONS

Many tube aficionados hold that amplifiers built with the venerable 300B tube hold the aces when it comes to sonic purity and beauty of harmonic line. Cary Audio Design's Dennis Had succeeded in producing what many believe is the definitive moderately sized single-ended triode (SET) amplifier: the CAD 300SE. This monoblock, powered by classic 300B Western Electric or derivative tubes, could provide 8–10Wpc, requiring the adoption of relatively moderate volume settings and/or sensitive, easy-to-drive loudspeakers. Cary also produced a lower-priced "integrated" stereo chassis, the CAD 300SEI.

Onkyo released a tantalizing bit of news on February 25: Sometime before summer, it intends to release a remote interactive dock (RI) for "specified iPod models and many of the Onkyo products (as many as five million worldwide) produced over the past 10 years."

Last month, we <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/012405roundup/">reported</A&gt; that audio engineers with a yen for magnetic tape were hoarding their remaining stockpiles in the wake of the Chapter 11 restructuring&ndash;inspired shutdown of the <A HREF="http://www.quantegy.com">Quantegy</A&gt; plant in Opelika, Alabama. What a difference a month makes! Two new sources have come to the rescue.

Music buyers will find a new report issued by <A HREF="http://www.parksassociates.com">Parks Associates</A> both interesting and disturbing. Interesting in what it purports to reveal about consumers, and, as we shall see, disturbing in how the music industry is being urged to interpret the data.

Gunther Frohnh&#246;fer, Acoustic Signature turntable designer and company owner, informed me last week that the business relationship between his company and Ballmann, the manufacturer of the German Behold line of electronics, which includes a headshell-mounted 768kHz/24-bit A/D converter (see my "Analog Corner" column in the forthcoming April 2005 issue of <I>Stereophile</I>), has been severed. Frohnh&#246;fer has relinquished his position as Ballmann's general manager. "Doing both my own product and the Behold electronics line was too much for one person to handle," he told me. Instead, Frohnh&#246;fer will focus on his core turntable business, while Mr. Ballmann will continue developing, manufacturing, and marketing his electronics line.

I have always been a dyed-in-the-wool vinyl fan, committed to the superiority of analog over current 44kHz/16-bit CD technology. Nevertheless, I have been surprised at how greatly the sound of CD has improved over the past 10 years. By 1994, digital had gotten much closer to analog than I had ever expected, which was a good thing, as 1994 also saw the disappearance of the LP as a medium for obtaining new releases of mainstream recordings. But over the last two years, I've noticed some interesting phenomena: More turntables, tonearms, and cartridges started to become available, at least in the high-end arena. Audiophiles and, to a lesser extent, segments of the general music-loving public, began clamoring for new vinyl releases. Specialty labels, such as Classic Records and Acoustic Sounds, started to reissue premium vinyl releases of classical, jazz, and pop classics at reasonable prices. And major labels again began to offer vinyl versions of major pop releases.

<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/117">Paul Hales</A> does things differently. "I set out to build a true reference speaker," he asserted when I asked him about the, er, <I>concept</I> behind his Concept Five loudspeaker. For a mere six grand? The other guys don't even blink at $20k, $30k, even $70k statement speakers.