Steve's whammy arrived amid an e-mail exchange among Stereophile writers concerning a rather clueless column in another publication on the dearth of women audiophiles. After asking how many female audiophiles each of us knew, Steve G. defined what he meant by audiophile: "a person who frets over their system, agonizes over choices, loves gear, and sometimes music. You know, the kind of person who reads Stereophile or The Abso!ute Sound. Merely owning a nice stereo doesn't make you an audiophile. Owning a Leica doesn't make you a photographer. You have to be at least a little obsessed."
The first thing you hear is not Sly Stone's keyboards or harmonica. Not Freddie Stone's guitar. Not Greg Errico's amazing drumming. Not Larry Graham's slapping bass. Not the voices of Rose Stone (also keys) and Cynthia Robinson (also trumpet). Not Jerry Martini's saxophone.
No. The first thing you hear is pure energy: the nuclear reaction of musical power that Sly and his Family Stone generated onstage on two October nights in 1968 at the Fillmore East. James Brown and his band(s) had nothing on these seven. This is prime Sly, when the band was still hungry, before the hits, before his life spun out of control, the music suffered, and the family split.
When Cary Christie, Arnie Nudell, and John Ulrick founded Infinity Systems more than 25 years ago, high-end audio as we know it today didn't exist. Hi-fi was audio, though the reverse wasn't necessarily true.
Through the growth years, Infinity became a major force in the High End. Cary Christie is the only one of the original players still associated with Infinity in 1995, now part of Harman International. His relationship, however, is now as an independent designer and consultant with Christie Designs, Inc. (footnote 1). I corralled him by phone on a clear fall day in Santa Fe, and a snowy one at his home near Lake Tahoe, Nevada. I asked him how Infinity had started.
Paradigm is not a new name to US audiophiles, but the Canadian loudspeaker company hopes to increase awareness of its products with their Monitor series, all members of which incorporate a similar design philosophy and drive-units. Heavy and apparently massively constructed, the top-of-the-line Paradigm Studio Monitors ($1899/pair) are the first commercial loudspeakers to pass my way with provision for tri-wiring: three sets of terminals on the back of the enclosures provide direct links to the crossover segments feeding each separate driver (or drivers, in the case of the low end).
Those crossovers use quasi-Butterworth filters, but there is, by design, little attempt to correct for driver aberrations in the crossover, a technique which Paradigm does not believe produces the best results. The wood-veneered cabinet is solidly constructed, making use of a combination of high-density composite hardboard and MDFa technique claimed to reduce uncontrolled resonances. MDF cross-bracing is provided, and four heavy-duty spikes are furnished per speaker. (I used Tonecones in my listening for the simple reason that three spikes are self-leveling, four are not.)