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I have to admit that Monitor Audio has been one of those companies whose products I've just taken for granted. I went into the Monitor Audio room at FSI more-or-less from a sense of duty, but was almost literally stopped in my tracks. What's this? A new speaker that doesn't have the conservative look that I associate with Monitor Audio, and sound that was arrestingly lifelike. The speaker was the Platinum 300 ($8995—all prices in this report per pair), the top of the Platinum range that will be available in May 2007. It uses a ceramic-coated aluminum-magnesium ribbon tweeter, honeycomb…
Readers with really long memories may recall the ESS Heil speakers, which had a tweeter whose working principle was described in ads as being like squeezing a cherry pit. Oskar Heil was undoubtedly a gifted inventor, and the Heil "Air Motion Transformer" principle is gathering new adherents. Elsewhere in this show report blog, I discuss the products from Adam Professional Audio, whose Accelerated Ribbon Technology is a variant of the Air Motion Transformer principle. Speakers from the Chinese company, Mark & Daniel, fall in the same category. They call their drivers "Directly…
As well as being the 20th anniversary of FSI, 2007 also represents a change in its leadership. Marie-Christine Prin, whose hard work, efficiency, and charm had built up FSI to its current success, has passed the reins to Michel Plante, an industry veteran with an impressive background in audio at the technical as well as the sales/marketing level. The transition in leadership appears to have been seamless, a fact that Michel credits largely to the work of Céline Roy, who was Marie-Christine Prin's second-in-command, and who has stayed on with FSI. Michel Plante has ambitious plans to…
But he's still amazing, as this subdued (for him) performance of "Le Moribond" proves amply. Leave it to Brel to put this much life into a song about dying. Forget "Seasons of the Sun," this was the original and still the greatest.
Four Tet has done something I would have thought impossible: produce an entertaining Morris dance video.
Via aworks.
Not that I had any idea what Sigur Ros' "Hoppipolla" was about (actually, I never know what any Sigur Ros song is about), but this video wouldn't have even made the top 20 possibilities.
Walking to the office on this sloppy Monday morning, through April's cold rain, with a mind full of dreams and promises of warmer, brighter things, I got the feeling that it might as well be last Friday all over again. What the hell?
Listening to music on the hi-fi is what it is. Listening to music on the hi-fi is two treats in one. Listening to music on the hi-fi is:
1. Listening to music
2. On the hi-fi
And how great is that? Really. What else can we want from this life? Sure, a house in California, NJ, with windows that open out into a great, big, Peruvian…
We'd say we told you Sound Grammar was a winner, but we were really just echoing what Fred Kaplan said. His essay on the record is worth reading again—or for the first time, if you didn't take our word for it the first time around.
The Fraunhofer Institute is working on an active soundproof window that's "particularly effective at frequencies of 50–1000Hz." I want one now—but it'll be four years before they make it to market.
Apparently, Newton, not those modifiers, was right all along. F=ma totally rules!