LATEST ADDITIONS

I've spent six-odd years in a sort of hi-fi counterculture, playing with things like mono cartridges, one-box CD players, and cheap, homemade cables&mdash;and, of course, owning and listening to single-ended triode (SET) amplifiers and horn loudspeakers. But before all that, I owned components that, while more mainstream, did the job just as well in certain ways. That category included solid-state electronics (Naim, BEL, Spectral), dynamic loudspeakers of middling efficiency (ProAc, Epos, Magneplanar), electrostatic loudspeakers of very low efficiency (Stax), and even "high-end" accessories like Tiptoes and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/69/">Shun Mook Mpingo discs</A> (which I still have, although my five-year-old daughter has more or less permanently co-opted the latter for playtime use).

It's a simple premise: power corrupts. You can buy the finest audio components in the world, but if the foundation of your aural house is rotten, you won't get anything vaguely resembling the level of performance your gear was designed to provide. Over time, I've come to realize just how fragile the audio signal chain is, dependent as it is on electrical sources fatally compromised by all manner of aural schmutz pouring through the local grid. I've become obsessed with figuring out how to liberate my system from the line noise, reactive loads, and voltage anomalies that veil the presentation, obscure resolution, and limit dynamic range.

In the June issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, Art Dudley <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?855&quot; TARGET=NEW>waxes poetic</A> about the virtues of bluegrass music and festivals. What do you think about this acoustic form?

"Does the modern audiophile want a sleek, compact, powerful, remote-controlled, microprocessor-driven, two-channel integrated amplifier?" Michael Fremer seeks the answer as he reviews the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/858/">Perreaux R200i integrated amplifier</A>. It may be small, but as MF finds, it also packs a punch.

The music world is mourning the passing of British record producer Mickie Most, who died of lung cancer in London on May 30. He was 64.

There may be hope for the most common type of hearing loss. Researchers at the University of Michigan have succeeded in growing new hair cells in the inner ears of laboratory animals, the first time that such cells have been regenerated in mammals.

Of all the components to be seen and heard at an audio show or in a dealer's showroom, the most memorable and attention-grabbing are inevitably the super-speakers&mdash;bogglingly expensive, filled with cutting-edge engineering and exotic materials, of mammoth size and weight, with full-range reproduction that shakes building foundations and extends far enough up top to disrupt the navigation of bats. Survey the field, and the biggest Wilson, Al&#143;n, JMlab-Focal, Burmester, EgglestonWorks, and Nearfield Acoustics models, to name a few, fit that description.