The SourcePoint 10 was the first MoFi speaker to be designed by Andrew Jones, whose earlier designs for KEF, Infinity, Pioneer, TAD, and ELAC had all taken up residence in Stereophile's Recommended Components listings over the years. The second of Andrew's designs for MoFi was the SourcePoint 8, which was favorably reviewed by Kalman Rubinson in September 2023. Priced at a competitive $1999/pair, the SourcePoint 8 also used a coaxial drive unit, but as the name suggests, the woofer diameter was 8" rather than 10". KR was also impressed by what he heard, writing that the SourcePoint 8 was a balanced, wide-range speaker that demonstrated how satisfying a small, relatively affordable loudspeaker can be.
Now we have Andrew Jones's third design for MoFi, the floorstanding SourcePoint 888, which costs $4999/pair.
In a Connecticut courtroom on Wednesday, Kristofer D'Agostino, son of late Krell owner and CEO Rondi D'Agostino, won control over his own trust, opening a path for Krell to begin to get its ducks in a row.
With subwoofers, he's at his worst. Did you hear that?, he'll exclaim when he worries that a low bass note received too much emphasis. He nags and niggles that perhaps the integration between the main speakers and the subwoofer leaves a crater somewhere in the low-frequency band. He harps, not always believably, that he can hear where the subwoofer is, even though deep bass is supposed to be impossible to localize. Most of all, he barely lasts a song without getting twitchy about the sub's gain setting, imagining that he has to dial in exactly the right amount of deep-bass presence with each track.
Hi-fi dealership Big Kids Toys, in Greensboro, North Carolina, is aptly named. Since its 2002 inception, fun has been at the center of its ethos. At the outset, company founder Michael Twomey established a mantra: "Life is short. Enjoy yourself." It might not be all that original, but it's apt.
In the third quarter of 2024, Big Kids Toys began expanding to the Midwest: The dealership's sales manager, North Carolina native Luke Sumerford (above), opened a home-based dealership in Fort Wright, Kentucky, about five miles from the Ohio River and Cincinnati, Ohio. That's a long way from Greensboro.
Sumerford, at 29, is part of hi-fi's youth movement. He hopes to instillor reinforce, or bring backmusical enjoyment as the central pillar of the hi-fi hobby.
When I recollect the soundtrack to my acid-tinged summer of 1967, several LPs stand out: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's you-know-what, The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties, Richie Havens's Mixed Bag, and Dennis Brain's equally famed recording of the Mozart Horn Concertos, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Though all of them sounded potent and execrable, in equal parts, through our starvingex-student record players, neither the Mozart's monophonic provenance nor the too-distant sound of Brain's horn could diminish the joy it brought me...
How wonderful it is to revisit these tuneful, often jolly concertos played by a superb horn virtuoso, Alec Frank-Gemill, backed by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra conducted by one of the world's most distinguished period-practice authorities, Nicholas McGegan.