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Newcomer Revel has been on a roll lately, piling up accolades all around for its new line of loudspeakers. Larry Greenhill takes a look at the recently unveiled Revel">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/96/">Revel Salon and explains how it compares to the Sydney Opera House. "Did the Salon meet its design goals of timbral accuracy, low distortion, and lack of dynamic compression?" Read all about it in Greenhill's report.

You think we've got format problems these days? Take a peek back to 1963, when J. Gordon Holt ripped apart the then-new record technology from RCA in "Down">http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/95/">"Down with Dynagroove". Next, Wes Phillips writes an ode to his own Mr. Holland in "A">http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/94/">"A Passion for Music".

In the classic textbook example, the Doppler effect is demonstrated by an increase in both pitch and volume (or amplitude) of a train's whistle as it approaches a station, followed by a decrease in pitch and volume as it moves away. This effect---the shift of a frequency emitted by a moving object---leads to a fundamental flaw in audio technology. A midrange driver behaves like the approaching-and-departing train when it attempts to reproduce varying frequencies. When the driver is fed simultaneous 400Hz and 2kHz tones, the forward movement of the cone at the lower rate modulates the 2kHz tone upward in pitch and amplitude; when it moves backward it modulates the higher tone downward. (The human eardrum also behaves this way, but the brain's audio-analysis circuitry knows how to deal with it.)