LATEST ADDITIONS

Two years ago, music business insiders were predicting that the industry's "Big Five" would eventually become the "Big Four," or possibly the "Big Three."

Trickle-down technology is a grand thing. It's comparatively easy to build an exceptional audio component when there are no constraints on technology, cost, user-friendliness, or lack thereof, but top designers are now packing more and more of the excellence of damn-the-torpedoes components into more affordable and accessible packages. Which brings us to the Aesthetix Rhea, a tubed phono preamplifier of exceptionally distinguished lineage.

With Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio four years old as established media this fall, the two-decades-old Compact Disc medium is still well-established as the primary carrier for recorded music. (Yes, it is experiencing a significant threat from downloadable music files, but that is outside my bailiwick as a hardware reviewer.) <I>Stereophile</I> has therefore been paying attention to the high-performance one-box CD players that are available. In May, I wrote about my positive experiences with the $2950 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/840/">Ayre CX-7</A> and Brian Damkroger favorably reviewed the $2999 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/839/">GamuT CD1</A>, after having followed up his April 2001 review of the $5495 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/">Simaudio Moon Eclipse</A> player in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/index6.html">April 2003</A>.

It doesn't take much to read between the lines of Sony's discontinuation of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/700/">TA-P9000ES analog preamplifier</A> and their introduction of the SCD-XA9000ES SACD player with IEEE1394 digital output at <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11662/">Home Entertainment 2003</A>. (A similar feature from the DVD-Audio camp has been promised.) Surely, we will at long last be able to have external digital processing and DACs in our preamp or control units. In addition to the freedom to mix and match components, this opens the door to having a single digital component manage bass and channel balance for all sources, and room/speaker correction without redundant redigitization.

Audiophile systems are made to fit just about any room, big or small. How large is your primary listening space?

We kick off three speaker reviews from the September issue with Brian Damkroger's assessment of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/919/">Audio Physic Virgo III loudspeaker</A>. A perfect meld of minimonitor <I>and</I> full-range bass extension? BD reveals all.

Audio companies create products that are based on a variety of technologies, provoking lawsuits every once in a while when patents are involved. One such lawsuit erupted earlier this year as Robert W. Carver, designer for and founder of <A HREF="http://www.sunfire.com">Sunfire Corporation</A>, filed a US patent lawsuit against <A HREF="http://www.audioprods.com/">Audio Products International</A> (API).