Vivid Audio Introduces Giya Cu Loudspeakers
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Sennheiser Drops HDB 630 Wireless Headphones
Sponsored: Radiant Acoustics Clarity 6.2 | Technology Introduction
PSB BP7 Subwoofer Unveiled
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Sponsored: Pulsar 121
Sonus faber Announces Amati Supreme Speaker
Sponsored: Symphonia
CH Precision and Audiovector with TechDAS at High End Munich 2025
Sponsored: Symphonia Colors

LATEST ADDITIONS

Stereophile Sponsors Festival Son & Image

The Home Entertainment Show, promoted by <I>Stereophile</I>, <I>Ultimate AV</I>, and <I>Home Theater</I> magazines, successfully showed off the best in high-end audio and home theater to enthusiasts from 2001 through 2007. However, following its acquisition of the magazines in August 2007, Source Interlink Media decided not to promote the Home Entertainment Show in 2008. Instead, <I>Stereophile</I> is partnering with the Festival Son & Image, to be held in Montreal, Canada, Thursday April 3 through Sunday, April 6. (The first day is for trade and press only.)

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Is It the Economy, Stupid?

<B>We get letters department:</B> Here at <I>Stereophile</I>, we talk to people in the high-end audio industry all the time, and we frequently get fascinating emails from movers and shakers within the industry. This week we received one that got us thinking about outsourcing manufacturing and how it could affect high-end consumers.

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Parasound Halo JC 2 line preamplifier

My very first review of a preamplifier, for British magazine <I>Hi-Fi News & Record Review</I> in May 1984, was of the Audio Research SP-10. In my opening to that review, I wrote that, "more than any other component," a preamplifier "should approximate to the late <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/121503walker">Peter Walker</A>'s 'Straight Wire with Gain.'" By this I meant that a preamplifier should not be in the business of effecting dramatic changes, and in any case, dramatic changes are not the kind that prove to be of lasting value. However, I also wrote back then that what I became increasingly aware of while using the SP-10 "was the fact that 'neutrality' is a positive virtue rather than just an absence of aberration."

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The MP3 Talk

Back around Christmastime, when everyone around me seemed to be receiving iPods and gift certificates to the iTunes store, I thought I should give my loved ones <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/123107talk/">The MP3 Talk</a>. Now, John Atkinson, has prepared another version of <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd/index.html">The MP3 Talk</a>&#151live and in color with all sorts of cool graphs and stuff!

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Biggest Music Industry Screw-Ups Ever?

<I>Blender</I> has just posted its nominations for <A HREF="http://www.blender.com/articles/default.aspx?key=18696">greatest record industry screw-ups</A>. I have a few quibbles, but as a whole, <I>Blender</I> tells a tale of monumental stupidity,from Decca passing on the Beatles because Dick Rowe was irritated that too many frantic teens were attempting to get into the Cavern Club to shutting down Napster without having a legitimate channel to replace it.

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Come On, Skinny Love

Like <a href="http://stereophile.com/thefifthelement/208fifth/">John Marks</a> and my uncle <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/021308sing/">Omar</a&gt;, I am prone to enthusiasms. It's not unusual for me to hear some new piece of music and wind up feeling that I need it&#151<i>neeeeeeed</i> it. So what? Music is great. It <i>is</i> unusual for me, though, to hear some new piece of music and be so moved by it that I leave work early, race up Madison Avenue, charge down into Grand Central, take the 4 to Union Square, and face the many temptations of the vast Virgin Megastore to buy that new piece of music.

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