LATEST ADDITIONS

Making good on a promise <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10923/">reported</A&gt; back in December of last year, <A HREF="http://www.threshold-audio.com">Threshold Audio</A> has returned the Threshold brand to the market with a new stereo power amplifier.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.asahi-kasei.co.jp/akm/index.htm">Asahi Kasei Microsystems Semiconductor</A> (AKM), which supplies audio ICs for professional and consumer products, announced its line of Direct Stream Digital (DSD) Digital-to-Analog converters capable of supporting both Super Audio CD (SACD) Direct-Stream Bigital and 24-bit/192kHz LPCM DVD-Audio formats.

Electronic equipment worth millions of dollars is damaged every year by lightning strikes and power outages caused by summer storms. These seasonal threats have been amplified by the possibility of rotating blackouts, as well as resulting recent policy changes by major utility companies.

In 1991, British loudspeaker manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.bwspeakers.com">B&W</A&gt; celebrated its 25th birthday with the introduction of the John Bowers Silver Signature loudspeaker (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/272/">review</A&gt;). Not the largest or most expensive speaker on the company chart, the John Bowers Silver Signature, named after the company's late founder, still prompted John Atkinson to write that its performance was the best he'd heard for its modest size in his listening room.

Chet Atkins, the good-natured guitarist and successful record producer who established Nashville as the capitol of country music, in the process of transforming the music itself, died on Saturday, June 30. He had battled cancer for several years. He was 77.

Listening to multichannel music with the new SACD and DVD-Audio players has produced equal parts contentment and consternation. The contentment is easy to understand: Here are media that can reproduce music with better-than-CD resolution and, for the first time, re-create a believable illusion of the entire acoustic space in which the performance was recorded. The consternation is related to those same two issues: 1) maintaining the resolution and tonal balance relished with high-quality stereo, and 2) making the psychological transition from two-channel to multichannel listening. Both of these are barriers to audiophile acceptance of multichannel music.

It's been three years since we last asked this question, and reader Jeffrey Michael suggests we ask it again: With all the different speaker technologies on the market, which technology have you adopted for your current audio system?