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Carson City, NV loudspeaker company Wisdom Audio has been aggressively reorganizing itself lately. The first part of the program was re-uniting founder Tom Bohlender with erstwhile partner David Graebner to refine and perfect the magnetic planar speaker technology used by Wisdom's hybrid planar/dynamic loudspeakers. Then, in October 2006, the company appointed industry veteran Mark Glazier <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/100906glazier/">president</A&gt;. On February 8, Glazier announced that Jon Herron would join the company as vice president of sales.

<I>Stereophile</I> editor John Atkinson said one evening in 1995, "What I find fascinating is that, in an industry as mature as audio cables, a new company can appear out of the blue and upset everything." He was gently poking fun at my admission that I found cable design fascinating, in particular the practice of combining different conductor materials.

If reviewers can be believed, the diminutive, $995/pair Epos ES11 loudspeaker has been a phenomenal success worldwide since its 1990 introduction. <I>Stereophile</I> added its voice to this hallelujah chorus in Vol.14 No.7, when the '11 kicked butt in a blind-listening-panel evaluation of inexpensive small speakers. While the ES11 did plenty of things extremely well, it was inevitable that it was limited in terms of ultimate sound-pressure levels (spls), deep-bass extension, and dynamic persuasiveness. While the ES11 was an unqualified success given its modest size and price, one couldn't help but wonder what Epos might be capable of in a larger model. (While a larger Epos model already existed in the $1695/pair <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/566">ES14</A&gt;, it predated the technology of the ES11 by four years.)

The latest edition of <I>Audio</I>'s annual equipment directory lists 238 speaker manufacturers. At best I can claim to have heard one product from 10&ndash;15% of the manufacturers on this list, and the top of the current product line from a far smaller percentage.

They're all in your head and they "reverberate in an electrical limbo state that almost, but not quite, comes unglued." That explains so much.

Huckleberry uses the monitor to skritch that chin. Who needs humans?

Neal Strauss, author of <I>The Game</I>, a book chronicling his development as a pick-up artist, has written a great essay about interviewing Ms. Spears using the power seduction techniques he learned.