LATEST ADDITIONS

It was almost five years ago that I first spent some serious auditioning time with an omnidirectional two-piece speaker from German manufacturer MBL: the four-way MBL 111. When I reviewed the 111 in the April 1998 Stereophile, I had been extremely impressed with the speaker's stereo imaging, which was superbly stable and well-defined, with images that floated completely free of the speaker positions. The tonal balance was also excellent, with a rich midrange, superbly clean highs, and extended lows. "This Radialstrahler is one of the best tweeters I have experienced," I wrote. In fact, the 111 was let down only by bass frequencies that tended to lag behind the music slightly.

Last week we singled out DVD-Audio, which clearly has left readers wondering, when it comes to promotion. This week we get to see if SACD has done any better. Has SACD been marketed properly?

"You'd be hard-pressed to find a company more protective of its reputation than Krell," says Wes Phillips, as he heads off to evaluate the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/638/">Krell KAV-300<I>cd</I> CD player</A>. WP ponders whether that reputation is still intact as the company tries to save its customers some money.

The US Copyright Office is being pulled in opposite directions over a recent decree establishing royalty rates for music played by webcasters. On one side are radio stations and Internet-only music sites, which claim that the rates are too high. On the other side is the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which claims that the rates are too low. Both sides have filed separate appeals in US federal court.

DVD-Audio proponents, ranging from record labels execs and mastering engineers to CE manufacturers, staged a press event on August 9 at Dolby Labs in Los Angeles in the hopes of rekindling interest in their format, which has been quietly trying to launch for the last year or so. Warner Bros Records has gone so far as to call this current effort a "re-launch", but after spending over four hours with the DVD-A folks, this reporter thinks there's a good chance we may be seeing yet another official launch once most of the current issues (detailed below) are sorted out.

The Super Audio CD is gaining serious momentum.

"My god. This was better than any hi-fi I had ever experienced&mdash;I actually had Sergei Rachmaninoff <I>in the room</I>, playing Mendelssohn just for <I>me</I>. I am not ashamed to say that I wept." I wrote those words in the January 2001 <I>Stereophile</I>, about hearing a piano-roll transcription of Rachmaninoff performing Mendelssohn's <I>Spinning Song</I> (Op.67 No.34) on a B&#246;sendorfer Imperial 290SE reproducing piano. I was in the middle of recording <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//musicrecordings/298/">Robert Silverman's cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas</A> at the Maestro Foundation in Santa Monica, where there just happened to be a floppy disk with Wayne Stahnke's transcription of the Rachmaninoff for the B&#246;sendorfer mechanism, which Stahnke invented.