LATEST ADDITIONS

June is a always a perplexing time for me. The weather is lovely, the mountain wildflowers are blooming, things are pretty calm at work.....but it's Bonnie's birthday.

From the October 2004 issue, Larry Greenhill reviews the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/1004rel">REL Studio III subwoofer</A>, explaining, "Determined to experience sub-bass in my listening room, I arranged with REL's US importer, Sumiko Audio, to audition their largest subwoofer, the Studio III."

You hear a dismaying amount of bad sound on the Audio Engineering Society (<A HREF="http://www.aes.org">AES</A&gt;) convention floor. Tizzy high frequencies and mushy bass are more common than not, but encouragingly, good-sounding products tend to draw small crowds or generate a buzz among attendees.

Multichannel music was addressed by several seminars at this year's AES. On Friday, the Center Channel Challenge convened with a trio of recording engineers moderated by DTS's Jeff Levison.

While some may disagree, it would seem that both competing high-rez audio formats, SACD and DVD-Audio, have stalled in the marketplace. Why do you think this is?

Once upon a time there was a violin maker who had two quarrelsome sons, and their names were John and Rudolf. When the boys came of age, their father put them to work in his shop, but John and Rudolf found it difficult to get along with one another, and they quarreled even more bitterly after the old man died.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised when I first spied the prototypes for Sonic Frontiers' luscious new digital combo, the Transport 3 CD transport and Processor 3 D/A processor, at HI-FI '97 in San Francisco. After all, this is the company whose meteoric rise from an electronic parts-supply outfit run out of president Chris Johnson's basement, to a large factory pumping out an impressive array of entry-level to <I>cr&#232;me de la cr&#232;me</I> tube electronic components, has elevated Sonic Frontiers to front-line status among high-end manufacturers.