Products of the Year

Audio Power Industries Power Wedge 1 AC line conditioner ($499; reviewed by Corey Greenberg, Vol.14 No.11, November 1991)

Again I smiled when I counted up the votes in this category. The winner was a product, the kind of which didn't even exist just a few years ago. The conventional wisdom, at least in domestic systems, used to be that a component's power supply offered an insuperable barrier to the slings and arrows of outrageous AC line glitches and garbage. In these more pragmatic days, we accept the fact that AC power is as grundge-ridden as our industrial society can make it, and that, like chicken soup, every little bit of garbage rejection helps make the silences between the notes more silent. In its basic form—there is now a family of Wedges—the Power Wedge offers filtered, spike-rejecting AC outlets, each isolated with a transformer for low-consumption components like preamps and CD players, as well as outlets that are just filtered, for the big guys like power amplifiers. An awardee that almost defines what these awards are about: good, sensible engineering in the service of music.

Finalists (in alphabetical order

Celestion DLP600 digital loudspeaker processor ($799; reviewed by John Atkinson, Vol.15 No.8, August 1992)
Expressive Technologies IC-1 interconnect ($595/1m pair; reviewed by Robert Harley, Vol.15 No.7, July 1992)
RoomTunes, etc. (from $39.50/pair (EchoTunes) to $239/pair (RoomTunes); reviewed by Guy Lemcoe, Vol.15 No.3, March 1992)