LATEST ADDITIONS

The way I figure it, the least <I>Popular Science</I> can do is publish articles like this about jet-packs. If I recall correctly, it predicted we'd <I>all</I> have one in the Twenty-First Century.

My favorite: "I will not have Henry throwing tomatoes at a spinning fan blade whilst yelling at Montjoy."

As a writer, I applaud the new essay section of the SAT, but Karin Klein got up close and personal with it by passing the test to <I>score</I> the essays. She discovered some interesting things about taking&mdash;and scoring&mdash;the SATs.

I grew up in the South and I cannot pronounce "pen" and "pin" so they are distinguishable. I showed Ms Ph.D. in Linguistics this article and said, "See, my dialect isn't weird after all."

Stereo is now just one option in setting up a system. But is it the option you prefer, or does multichannel do it better for you? If you listen to SACD, which do you prefer (assuming both are available on the disc): the stereo mix or the multichannel mix?

<I>Signal savings:</I> Signals SuperFi, LLC did something you don't see every day: It actually <I>lowered</I> its price for Stereovox Reference level SEI-600 interconnects. The SEI-600 is a line-level, single-ended, single-jacket "stereo" cable. Signals has dropped the price of a 1m pair from $999.99 to $749.99 (each extra 0.5m adds $250).

As much as I'm tempted by the impressive sweep and scale with which some of the large, full-range loudspeakers endow music, for some reason I find myself more at home with more compact examples of the breed. This is not through lack of familiarity with large speakers, a pair of <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/506">B&W Matrix 801</A>s occupying pride of place in our living room (which also serves as my wife's listening room). Yet I find myself hankering after that ultimate soundstage precision that only minimonitors seem capable of producing: the loudspeakers totally disappearing, vocal and instrumental images hanging in space, truly solid&mdash;the prefix "stereo-" is derived from the Greek word <I>stereos</I>, which means solid&mdash;so that a rectangular, totally transparent window into the concert hall opens at the rear of your room. In addition, the necessarily limited low-frequency extension offered by small speakers makes it much easier to get the optimum integration with the room acoustics below 100Hz.