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My beat for Stereophile—to attempt to share with you my brief take on equipment and systems that might be described as "Medium Budget"; not too cheap, not too pricey—just right! A daunting task, given the sheer amount of fine gear here that could fit into that budget ballpark. My first stop was late in the afternoon of the Thursday Press Day. I sought out familiar friendly faces in the Positive Feedback Online Hospitality Room. (Here is a photo of Positive Feedback editors David Robinson, right, and Dave Clark, left.) This is fast becoming sort of the audio equivalent of the Grateful Dead's long strange trip.

High-end audio is mostly about songs blaring from boxes. Occasionally, you can be sitting near some of these wailing boxes and think: Wow, these songs are sounding pretty darn good! If you’re an audiophile that means you’ve found a home. Today, on my first day in Newport Beach, California I am sitting in the lobby of the Irvine Hotel (home of The Home Entertainment Show Newport) getting myself psyched for room after room of blaring boxes and stacks of brochures, sproutin’ like cotton from every horizontal surface...

The story's been often told: 30 years ago, British speaker manufacturer KEF was asked to design a small, spherical loudspeaker that could be used in a European project to research room acoustics. The speaker had to have wide, even dispersion, so KEF's solution was to mount the tweeter coaxially, on what would have been the woofer's dustcap. That "point source" drive-unit, called the Uni-Q, began appearing in KEF's commercial speaker models in 1989, starting with the Reference 105/3—but it wasn't until the appearance of KEF's 50th-anniversary loudspeaker, the LS50, which I reviewed in December 2012, that I felt that the Uni-Q drive-unit had fully fulfilled its promise, at least in a speaker I had auditioned in my own room.