LATEST ADDITIONS

You'd think I would have learned to trust Matthew Polk by now, but I attended an NYC demonstration for his new SurroundBar 360 with relatively low expectations. That's because there's a current vogue for low profile, multichannel "bars" that give flatscreen monitor viewers a low profile, single-mount solution to the "problem" of all those extra speakers a multichannel A/V system requires.

Reader "craig" writes: "Okay, let's get right to it. What is the age of <I>Stereophile</I>'s readers? The reason I ask is the choice of 'favorite music' in a recent Vote question." So how old are you?

As it has for the last 12 years, <A HREF="http://www.thecableco.com/">The Cable Company</A>, along with many of its vendors, is dedicating August to help some of "the poorest people in the most ravaged regions of the world."

Recently, I got an e-mail from a colleague at another audio magazine complaining about the paucity of new SACD hardware. We've been hearing about the slowing pace of new SACD releases, and about Sony's neglect of a format they themselves developed, but I now realize that, apart from the High End (footnote 1), machines that can play SACDs have been fast disappearing from the middle of the market. When the battle of SACD <I>vs</I> DVD-Audio was <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/305awsi">raging</A&gt;, universal players that could play both formats were available from almost every major manufacturer. Even John Atkinson jumped on the bandwagon, acquiring a Pioneer DV-578A universal player for $150 to use as a reference. The exceptions were the very companies that had developed the new formats: Sony offered only SACD players, and Panasonic, at least at first, only DVD-A players. No matter&#151;you could buy a universal player at any national electronics chain store, even if that store didn't stock recordings in either format and their staff had never heard of DVD-As or SACDs. Some things never change.

The last time I was in England, I happened to be rummaging through some boxes in my mother's garage, boxes containing photographs, my old school books, concert programs, diaries, postcards—all the bric-a-brac you collect throughout your life that you'll never have a need for and can never discard. If anything, such rubbish is perhaps the nearest thing to roots that anyone can have these days. Among the boxes was an amplifier that had been an everyday companion of mine for many years, the vintage Vox AC100 I had used to amplify my Fender bass when on the road.

My phone rang and it was Dick Diamond, sales manager for YG Acoustics. "We'd like you to visit our factory and see what we're all about," Diamond said.

I don't quite know what I expected, but YGA's "factory" was not what I expected. I put factory in quotes because that sounds all automated and industrial, whereas YG's speakers are essentially built by hand. The speakers are constructed of aircraft grade 6061 T651 aluminum and the baffles are milled out of ballistic-grade aluminum/titanium alloy. On the day I arrived, the factory was being prepped for the delivery of a huge CNC station and a ceiling-mounted crane system to move large sheets of stock from station to station. At the moment, large panels are turned into speaker-sized parts by an outside contractor, but Geva prefers to do everything in-house so that he can assure himself that things are done to <I>his</I> specifications.