LATEST ADDITIONS

MartinLogan's Truth in Sound Tour continues with the introduction of its new flagship loudspeaker, the built-to-order Neolith, at Overture Ultimate Home Electronics, 2423 Concord Pike, Wilmington, DE on Saturday, November 8, from 11am to 6pm.

Virginia retailer Command Performance A/V—115 Park Ave. Suite #2, Falls Church—is having a Grand Opening on Saturday November 8 from 11am to 5pm. The day will feature Constellation Audio's new Inspiration Series (above), presented by Irv Gross, Director of Sales for Constellation Audio.

The Sheraton Center Hotel, venue of the 2014 Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show (TAVES), represents a marked change from the genteel elegance of the King Edward Hotel, the TAVES venue for the past two years. Built in 1972 in a modern style, the Sheraton offers a lot more space—it also sports one of the most confusing show layouts that I've encountered. There are long corridors leading who-knows-where, and stairs going up and down that may or may not lead to exhibit areas.

Do you travel? Commute, perhaps? Just like to listen to music privately around the house? No matter—the Astell&Kern AK240 is the luxury choice in high-resolution portable music players (footnote 1). It even comes with a lovely leather case that beautifully cradles its angular beauty. The AK240 can play all of your PCM files, up to a resolution of 24-bit/192kHz, as well as DXD and single- and double-rate DSD, natively, and can do so from its internal storage, from a microSD card, or from your computer via WiFi or a wired connection. It can also function as a DAC or USB-to-TosLink converter. I'm not so sure there's much left wanting.

Classical and jazz notwithstanding, an awful lot of new music is highly compressed, processed, and harsh, and it's about time we got used to it. Musicians, producers, and engineers are, in large part, on board with the sound, and any suggestion of making less-compressed recordings, with a wider dynamic range, is met with confused stares, or worse. One superstar producer didn't take kindly to my suggestion that he make two mixes for his new project: the standard compressed one, and another, less-crushed version. That didn't fly; he said there could be only one, the mix approved by him and the band, and that to them, a less-compressed mix wouldn't sound better. This producer is an audiophile, but he's not the least bit interested in making music for audiophiles. Harshness, it seems, isn't just a byproduct of compression; it's an integral part of the sound of today's music.

New location, new features, and a more inclusive, consumer electronics-orientated approach: that's the word on the fourth annual Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show (TAVES). Now ensconced in the Sheraton Centre Hotel in downtown Toronto, which offers far more large exhibit rooms than did TAVES' former venue, the three-day show opens on Friday, October 31 with four floors' worth of audio, video and consumer electronics-oriented exhibits.

With quiet elegance, the Sentec EQ11 phono stage and equalizer entered my expanding world of gramophone dreams. The EQ11 ($2500) is a modestly sized, tubed phono stage with the industry-standard RIAA phono equalization and five other EQ curves. These additional curves are for records pressed by companies that did not fully or promptly comply with the new, supposedly global industry standard introduced by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1954.