Budget Component Reviews

My home, which overlooks a dairy farm, is easy to see from a mile away, invisible from the end of its own driveway. Elevation: 1345'. Population: 3.

It's now been eight years since a Rega P3 turntable passed through my listening room. While the new P3-24 superficially resembles the P3 (and virtually every other Rega 'table), the company has made some significant changes, including upgrading to the high-quality, low-voltage (24V), electronically adjusted motor used in the more expensive P5, P7, and P9. As in those models, an electronic circuit trims the phase angle of the P3-24's motor coils, thus substantially reducing motor vibrations. In 1998, during a factory tour, a Rega engineer demonstrated the circuit's effectiveness to me. As he adjusted the circuit board's pot, vibrations from the motor dramatically decreased, until it was difficult to tell if the motor was spinning or not. Back then, this "hand-trimmed" motor technology was available only in the P9. The P3-24 uses a less sophisticated version of the same basic idea.

Stereophile should start a "Personals" section in the back of the mag—maybe stick 'em in with the classifieds:

Reality check number one. Tired of reading about the latest and greatest $65,000 loudspeakers? Or even the current hot ticket at $2500? Such loudspeakers promise to bring you the audio truth, or the golly-gee-whiz, honest-to-gosh, absolutely positively real sound. And some of them do seem to come awfully close, though truth be told, we're still a long way from replicating reality—and will never do it with just two channels.

The Fourier 6 has the special ability to generate large coherent sonic fields, from a box small enough to slip into an ordinary shopping bag. At $499/pair, the 6 competes directly with another remarkable-imaging, compact American speaker, the Spica">http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/446">Spica TC-50 ($420/pair).

One of the first affordable loudspeakers I reviewed for Stereophile was the original Paradigm">http://www.stereophile.com/standspeakers/628">Paradigm Reference Studio/20 bookshelf model, in the February 1998 issue (Vol.21 No.2). At the time, I felt that the $650/pair speaker was a breakthrough—although not completely devoid of colorations, its ratio of price to performance set a benchmark a decade ago. I kept the Studio/20s around for several years to compare with other bookshelf speakers I reviewed, and they remained listed in Stereophile's "Recommended Components" for several years after that. The Studio/20 is now in its fourth (v.4) iteration, so I thought I'd grab a pair to hear how they compared with current affordable bookshelf designs.

An enduringly healthy phono-cartridge industry? After a quarter of a century of rushing right out to buy the latest digital music appliances? You bet.