LATEST ADDITIONS

Just what <I>is</I> the absolute sound, and how do you get there from here? What the heck are we looking for as we endure the mirth of others while purposefully setting up our high-end systems? Is it, indeed, the sanctified sound of acoustic instruments in real space? Can we ever really achieve that? Or is it the accurate realization of the signal on the master tape? Or&mdash;as was recently suggested at the New York Noise single-ended lovefest, covered in this issue's "Industry Update"&mdash;are some of us looking for the emotion and the artist's intent?

Although the term "professional" is often used as part of model designations in consumer electronics, the actual overlap between the audiophile consumer market and the <I>real</I> pro market is quite small. There are speakers in common use as studio monitors that no self-respecting audiophile would want to be caught dead listening to, and the typical audiophile loudspeaker would go up in smoke if asked to pump out the kind of volume that pro application routinely demands. To a lesser extent, the same applies to amplifiers: pro is pro and consumer is consumer, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

Onkyo released a tantalizing bit of news on February 25: Sometime before summer, it intends to release a remote interactive dock (RI) for "specified iPod models and many of the Onkyo products (as many as five million worldwide) produced over the past 10 years."

Last month, we <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/012405roundup/">reported</A&gt; that audio engineers with a yen for magnetic tape were hoarding their remaining stockpiles in the wake of the Chapter 11 restructuring&ndash;inspired shutdown of the <A HREF="http://www.quantegy.com">Quantegy</A&gt; plant in Opelika, Alabama. What a difference a month makes! Two new sources have come to the rescue.

Music buyers will find a new report issued by <A HREF="http://www.parksassociates.com">Parks Associates</A> both interesting and disturbing. Interesting in what it purports to reveal about consumers, and, as we shall see, disturbing in how the music industry is being urged to interpret the data.

Gunther Frohnh&#246;fer, Acoustic Signature turntable designer and company owner, informed me last week that the business relationship between his company and Ballmann, the manufacturer of the German Behold line of electronics, which includes a headshell-mounted 768kHz/24-bit A/D converter (see my "Analog Corner" column in the forthcoming April 2005 issue of <I>Stereophile</I>), has been severed. Frohnh&#246;fer has relinquished his position as Ballmann's general manager. "Doing both my own product and the Behold electronics line was too much for one person to handle," he told me. Instead, Frohnh&#246;fer will focus on his core turntable business, while Mr. Ballmann will continue developing, manufacturing, and marketing his electronics line.