LATEST ADDITIONS

Akeem Olajuwon? Ralph Sampson? Yes, it <I>must</I> be the Twin Towers. No, wait&#151;it's the World Trade Centers!

For those of you who can't make it out to the Princeton Record Exchange, the good folks in Princeton have put together an excellent video tour of their wonderful store.

In light of last week's question, it seems appropriate for reader Glenn Bennett to ask: "Let's see how far back we can go. I caught the bug with a Knight reel-to-reel in 1955!" <P> What was the first component (or components) you purchased and what year was it?

You'd think I would have learned to trust Matthew Polk by now, but I attended an NYC demonstration for his new SurroundBar 360 with relatively low expectations. That's because there's a current vogue for low profile, multichannel "bars" that give flatscreen monitor viewers a low profile, single-mount solution to the "problem" of all those extra speakers a multichannel A/V system requires.

Reader "craig" writes: "Okay, let's get right to it. What is the age of <I>Stereophile</I>'s readers? The reason I ask is the choice of 'favorite music' in a recent Vote question." So how old are you?

Oh crap. I just received an e-mail from the Princeton Record Exchange. Turns out they've added thousands of titles to their already overwhelming collection of tantalizing vinyl.

Recently, I got an e-mail from a colleague at another audio magazine complaining about the paucity of new SACD hardware. We've been hearing about the slowing pace of new SACD releases, and about Sony's neglect of a format they themselves developed, but I now realize that, apart from the High End (footnote 1), machines that can play SACDs have been fast disappearing from the middle of the market. When the battle of SACD <I>vs</I> DVD-Audio was <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/305awsi">raging</A&gt;, universal players that could play both formats were available from almost every major manufacturer. Even John Atkinson jumped on the bandwagon, acquiring a Pioneer DV-578A universal player for $150 to use as a reference. The exceptions were the very companies that had developed the new formats: Sony offered only SACD players, and Panasonic, at least at first, only DVD-A players. No matter&#151;you could buy a universal player at any national electronics chain store, even if that store didn't stock recordings in either format and their staff had never heard of DVD-As or SACDs. Some things never change.