LATEST ADDITIONS

Today's posts follow a common theme. First, we direct you to the Reith lectures on BBC4. And yes, dear readers (this means you, Clay White), this time you get transcripts as well as audio streaming and podcasts.

Yes! Find out that it's a lot harder than you think to make a vinyl record. Best part: Incorrectly centering the disc. (Most record presses do a pretty good job of this.)

So I don't mind if you think I'm a hopeless dweeb for loving last night's <I>West Wing</I>. After all, when I asked my flight attendant for a special service on Saturday, I said, "you'll probably lose all respect for me . . . ."

If you read <I>Stereophile</I>'s audio news regularly, you'll frequently see items such as <I>XYZ Audio Acquired by Megalomart, Inc.</I> Have you ever wondered about what that really means? I haven't, and I <I>write</I> those stories. Heck, now that I think about it, over the last eight years, <I>Stereophile</I> has even <I>lived</I> one of those stories.

<I>Jamo's jammin':</I> At the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), <I>Stereophile</I> was entranced by the look of <A HREF="http://www.jamo.com/">Jamo</A>'s striking reference R 909 "open baffle" loudspeaker ($14,999/pair). The dipolar high-gloss R 909 (available in black, red, or yellow) dispenses with the conventional box enclosure, mounting two 15" (380mm) woofers, a proprietary 5.5" (150mm) hard-conical cone (HCC) midrange, and a 1" (25mm) ScanSpeak Revelator tweeter into its raked-back front baffle, which is reinforced by a "flying" rib that lends it rigidity.

Perhaps there is no subject more vigorously debated among audiophiles than the primacy of the loudspeaker. Many 'philes believe there is no more important element in a hi-fi system&mdash;after all, they reason, it doesn't matter how good the components ahead of the speakers are; if the transducers can't reproduce the signal, you can't hear it. On the other hand, the source adherents maintain, speakers can't reproduce information that hasn't been retrieved from the recording. Loudspeakers can limit the amount of information you hear, but they can't increase it. This is one of those irresolvable paradoxes similar to the question of which came first, the roast chicken or the omelet.

Tom Swift is a talented young loudspeaker designer. Tom believes that he has never been able to prove exactly how talented he is, because the company he works for refuses to build the cost-no-object loudspeaker he's been doodling designs for (on company time).