LATEST ADDITIONS

It's an acoustic fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley, crossing over at 1.75kHz, if you're keeping score at home.

More crossover naughty bits.

YGA gets its open air measurements by lifting the speaker under measurement away from that pesky floor boundary with a forklift.

Here's a sneak-peek at Mikey Fremer's upcoming DVD, "It's a Vinyl World, After All," scheduled to be released later this year. I swear: Mikey doesn't always talk like this. It's just that it's loud at the <a href="http://www.recordtech.com">RTI</a&gt; pressing plant, and Mikey's a little excitable.

Last Tuesday evening, JA and I left the office together and stormed through Madison Avenue's rush-hour onslaught, beneath so much Art Deco splendor, around Grand Central's excitement and confusion, passed happy hour revelers&#151slicked-backed men dressed in jackets and ties as if it wasn't 100 degrees outside, and impossibly radiant women in their picture-perfect poses sipping frozen drinks through tall, thin straws&#151to make our way into Park Avenue's old and golden Waldorf=Astoria.

There's a retro, Heathkit vibe to the curiously capitalized PrimaLuna ProLogue Eight CD player: a shelf of glowing tubes and a chunky transformer case perched atop a plain black chassis. But on closer inspection, it seems there's much more going on here. The chassis is made of heavy-gauge steel, with (according to the manual) a "five-coat, high-gloss, automotive finish," each coating hand-rubbed and -polished. The tube sockets are ceramic, the output jacks gold-plated. Inside, separate toroidal transformers power each channel. Custom-designed isolation transformers separate the analog and digital devices, to reduce noise. The power supply incorporates 11 separate regulation circuits. The output stage is dual-mono with zero feedback. Audio-handling chips include a Burr-Brown SRC4192 that upsamples "Red Book" data to 24-bit/192kHz, and one 24-bit Burr-Brown PCM1792 DAC per channel. Only the tiny silver control buttons (on the otherwise hefty faceplate of machined aluminum) betray a whiff of chintz.

I can't help wondering: how did the mainstream audio press, cheered Dynaco and Marantz and McIntosh and Quad for switching to transistors a couple of generations ago, greet the first tube-revival products from Audio Research and the like? What was the reaction when moving-coil cartridge technology, considered all but dead by the early 1970s, became the perfectionist hi-fi norm just a few years later? And what would the same people make of the fact that a high-mass, transcription-length pickup arm&#151;with interchangeable pickup heads, no less&#151;is one of the most recommendable phono products of 2008? The mind boggles.