LATEST ADDITIONS

Pssst. Hey you. Yeah, you . . . we know you're a tweaker. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You just wanna make it better, right? Even as everyone around you wants to know when enough's enough already.

The audiophile in the plaid shirt and gray Dockers had his hand up. Moderator Jonathan Scull handed him the roving microphone, and the <I>Stereophile</I> writers on the podium at HI-FI '99's Sunday afternoon "Ask the Editors" session shifted in their chairs. "This one's for John Atkinson," came the windup. The other writers relaxed; I started to sweat. Then the pitch: "How come <I>Stereophile</I> issues are so small these days?"

"There, <I>that</I>'s where you should put the microphone&mdash;5" from the end of my bow."

Back in 1985, J. Gordon Holt wrote: "It seems, these days, that many of us audiophiles have become so preoccupied with the minutiae of sound reproduction that we haven't even noticed that it doesn't sound like music any more." He was talking about the obsession with soundstaging and detail at the expense of <I>musical</I> accuracy. In "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/144/">Getting the Notes Right (Midrange Madness)</A>," he renders his lesson in classic JGH style, observing that "I have played on this old saw in these pages for so many years that it has turned into a dead sawhorse, but somehow the message never seems to get through. There should be no harm done by beating it into the ground a little farther."

CD recorders are the hottest ticket in audio at the moment. Philips and Marantz once dominated the category, but other manufacturers have recently jumped on board with their own versions, among them Pioneer and Harman/Kardon. <A HREF="http://www.onkyo.co.jp">Onkyo</A&gt; will introduce its DX-RD511 dubber later this month at the 1999 <A HREF="http://www.cedia.org/">CEDIA</A&gt; Expo in Indianapolis. The machine is expected to arrive in stores in October&mdash;just in time for the holiday season.

More than a million CD recorders have been sold in the last 21 months, making the category one of the most rapidly developing segments in the history of the consumer electronics industry. The news was delivered by <A HREF="http://www.philips.com/">Philips</A&gt; executives at the end of August at the IFA trade and consumer exhibition in Berlin, Germany.

Earlier this month, at the Internationale Funkausstellung 1999 in Berlin, Germany, <A HREF="http://www.syrinx.de">Syrinx music & media</A> announced that, together with <A HREF="http://www.panasonic.com/">Panasonic/Technics</A&gt; and their new DVD-Audio players (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10509/">previous story</A>), they successfully presented the world's first DVD-Audio disc. The Internationale Funkausstellung 1999 ran from August 28 until September 5 under the theme of "Your World of Consumer Electronics."