LATEST ADDITIONS

Computers are becoming an ever-increasing source of music for many listeners. Have you tried connecting your computer to your audio system? If you have, how did you do it?

Now is clearly crunch time for satellite radio. In the last year alone, over one million new subscribers have been added to front-runner <A HREF="http://www.xmradio.com">XM Satellite Radio</A>'s service, bringing its total to approximately 1.4 million. The company projects that it will reach a total of 2.4 million subscribers by the end of 2004, thus ensuring its survival.

This week we have two John Atkinson speaker reviews from the February 2004 issue. First, JA gets his hands on the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/204bw">B&W 705 loudspeaker</A>, commenting, "When I heard about the company's new 700 series of speakers, based on the technology featured in their cost-no-object Nautilus series but priced to sell in the real world, I asked to review the $1500/pair 705."

Pure technology developments don't often have an audiophile angle, but a February 9 announcement from <A HREF="http://www.inphase-tech.com">InPhase Technologies</A> caught our attention.

Quad: The Closest Approach
by Ken Kessler. Cambridge, England, UK: International Audio Group Ltd., 2003. Hardcover, 12" square, 215 pp. ISBN 0 954 57420 6.
Available from: Quad dealers or IAG America, 15 Walpole Park South, Walpole, MA 02801. Tel: (508) 850-3950.

Bob Reina has been doing more than his share of reviewing inexpensive speakers in the past couple of years. I thought it only fair to shoulder some of the load, therefore, by reviewing a small design that had sounded interesting when I heard it at a press preview, the Klipsch RB-15.

When I was first getting interested in "high fidelity," as we called it back in the 1960s, there was an audio dealer in Worthing, England called Bowers & Wilkins. Their advertisement in the February 1966 issue of Hi-Fi News features their annual sale, with a Quad Electrostatic Speaker priced at £30 instead of the manufacturer's recommended £37, and offering other bargains, from ReVox, Quad, Rogers, Leak, and Armstrong. Conspicuous by their absence from the ad are Bowers & Wilkins speakers. The first reference to those I could find was in the August 1968 issue of what was then called The Gramophone, when race-car driver turned audio critic John Gilbert raved about the P2 Monitor. Designed by avid concertgoer John Bowers with Peter Hayward and featuring an EMI bass unit and a Celestion tweeter, the two-way P2 was priced at more than twice the Quad speaker, at £159/pair.