Chord's CEO John Franks (right) and Bluebird Music's Jay Rein (left) regaled me with tales of Chord's Media Engine (price tbd). It includes an Intel Pentium 4 processor and up to 6TB of drive capacity, allowing you to centrally archive pretty much all varieties of CD and DVD formats. Chord promises "studio-quality audio" and "the best image processing technology available."
Revel main man Kevin Voecks demmed the new four-way Ultima Salon2, previewed yesterday by Wes Phillips, for the <I>Stereophile</I> scribes. It was worth the wait. With all-Mark Levinson electronics, the dem program ranged over many music types, culminating in Little Feat’s “Long Distance Love,” whose awesomely deep low frequencies didn’t faze the speaker’s triple 8” titanium-cone woofers with their edge-wound rubbon voice-coils. Price will be $22k/pair, with availability in early spring ’07.
With David and Sheryl Lee Wilson in Europe for the Milan and London Shows, son Daryl demonstrated for me how the Utah company’s newly redesigned Watch Dog subwoofer doubles as designer seating. The sub is now a more manageable passive design, one third smaller than the original, and is stackable. The Passive Dog can be controlled either by a home theater system’s bass management or, in a music system, by the outboard Watch Controller. This has both balanced and single-ended inputs and outputs, and features versatile high- and low-pass filters.
For $129.95, the JBL Spyro 2.1 system—available in black, fuschia, or retro blue with chrome highlights, as well as white— hooks up to your MP3 player and provides 6Wpc of neodymium-magnet Odyssey satellite power and 24W of Atlas woofer action. But don’t you just <I>love</I> the stylin’ styling! <I>Not</I> just for Spyro the Dragon gamers.
<a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/091605where/">Elements</a> (2005) and I (1977) share our birthday with (in order from oldest to youngest):
Sam Feng of Infrant Technologies hefts (barely) the Infrant Repertoire Digital Media Server, a 3TB NAS array designed specifically for high-end music systems. The Infrant contains four Seagate DB35 DynaPlay-enabled hard drives, which means you not only get huge storage capacity, but redundancy as well. Plus, it has a solid aluminum chassis with heat sinks, so no fan noise.
Bagheera, uncharacteristically agrees with the tabby. "You guys are pathetic."
Huckleberry pities us hairless apes, not least for our cluelessness concerning the value of half-eaten "presents."
Jeff Wong passes along this 2003 article on the fine (and in this age of compression, almost lost) art of disc mastering.
Athena Technologies has been known for surprisingly high-value speakers tailored for home theater. At CEDIA, they unveiled a new LS Series, with the audiophile's taste in mind. The line features cabinets with curved sides so that the profile tapers at the rear, fiber-glass cones and aluminum-dome tweeters. The top-of-this-line, LS-500B is only $350 each! If the voicing is as stated and the finish quality is as remarkable as the floor samples, this line could have a huge market impact.