LATEST ADDITIONS

Call me perverse, or perhaps I've just been around too many musicians for too long, but the part of Exhibitionism, The Rolling Stones traveling show that I liked best was the very opening display in which you walk into a facsimile of the apartment that the five band members once shared in London when they were starting out. You could almost smell the rotting garbage and unwashed socks and underwear.

New England Audio Resource's NEAR-50M is a cyborg: metal innards in a wooden body. It represents NEAR's top statement in the firm's Metal Diaphragm Technology speaker line, which features the "NEAR-Perfect" driver cone. Metal—in this case an anodized aluminum alloy—is much more rigid than paper or plastic. Hence, a driver with a metal cone acts more nearly as a true piston. When it comes to loudspeaker cones, breaking up is not hard to do. When that happens, the cone flexes in a complex pattern, generating harmonic distortion. A typical plastic or paper 8" woofer may experience its first breakup mode at a frequency as low as 500Hz. The NEAR 8" metal-cone woofer's first breakup mode is said to be well above 2kHz, and their 4" metal-cone midrange does much better than that.

Two of the most cherished terms in the lexicon of high end are "no holds barred" and "cost no object." These are usually applied, together, to the most expensive version of something currently on the market. But is either term really appropriate for an audio product? The answer is a flat, unequivocal No. No consumer product has ever conformed to the real meaning of those terms, and it is unlikely that one ever will.