LATEST ADDITIONS

<I>Stereophile</I> editor John Atkinson said one evening in 1995, "What I find fascinating is that, in an industry as mature as audio cables, a new company can appear out of the blue and upset everything." He was gently poking fun at my admission that I found cable design fascinating, in particular the practice of combining different conductor materials.

If reviewers can be believed, the diminutive, $995/pair Epos ES11 loudspeaker has been a phenomenal success worldwide since its 1990 introduction. <I>Stereophile</I> added its voice to this hallelujah chorus in Vol.14 No.7, when the '11 kicked butt in a blind-listening-panel evaluation of inexpensive small speakers. While the ES11 did plenty of things extremely well, it was inevitable that it was limited in terms of ultimate sound-pressure levels (spls), deep-bass extension, and dynamic persuasiveness. While the ES11 was an unqualified success given its modest size and price, one couldn't help but wonder what Epos might be capable of in a larger model. (While a larger Epos model already existed in the $1695/pair <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/566">ES14</A&gt;, it predated the technology of the ES11 by four years.)

As far as I can tell, Santa Fe&ndash;based speaker engineer <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/694">John Bau</A> had designed but four commercial loudspeakers before the TC-60 was launched at the 1994 Winter CES: in order of appearance, they were the Spica SC50i (1980), the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/446">TC-50</A&gt; (1983), the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/693">Angelus</A&gt; (1987), and the SC-30 (1989). None were expensive, and all garnered much praise, both in <I>Stereophile</I>'s pages and elsewhere.

They're all in your head and they "reverberate in an electrical limbo state that almost, but not quite, comes unglued." That explains so much.

At least, according to Bagheera, is <I>down</I>. Preferably from a height.

Neal Strauss, author of <I>The Game</I>, a book chronicling his development as a pick-up artist, has written a great essay about interviewing Ms. Spears using the power seduction techniques he learned.

In our move from the 9th floor to the 6th, a box containing a large amount of <i>Stereophile</i> back issues was damaged. All sorts of wildly-covered, strangely-colored, digest-sized issues came spilling out. A river of history.