Larry Greenhill fires up the Totem Acoustic Model 1 loudspeaker, noting that "the word totem is powerful in its own right." Will the Model 1 live up to the legend? Greenhill provides all the answers.
Art Dudley plugs in the Graham Robin tonearm, warning, "To justify its retail price of $795, the Graham Robin has got to be better than the $425 Rega…
More than 13,000 consumers attended HE2005, along with 2500 members of the trade and 612 journalists from around the globe. Over 250 brands were represented at the Show, and new products were in abundance from Acoustic Research, Body Sonic, Gini Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Manley Labs, Polk Audio, Simaudio,…
Also from October, Robert J. Reina takes a listen to the Polk RTi4 loudspeaker. Even though the speaker retails at $320/pair, RJR writes, "I was immediately taken by the Polk's detailed, natural, and delicate midrange. This, combined with unexaggerated articulation of low-level…
Also from the January, 2001 issue, Michael Fremer concludes that cables are, indeed, important as he presents a quick rundown of the Harmonic Technology interconnect & speaker cable. As Fremer discovered, sometimes cabling changes everything.
UMG reports that the Decca Music Group, which owns the Mercury Living Presence classical catalogue, will release the recordings on SACD starting on September 13 in the UK. The company adds that each SACD release will feature a three-channel (left, right, and center) transfer of the original three-channel recording and a new DSD two-channel stereo mix, as well as the original CD mix prepared by the…
Robert Baird reads a recent and revealing book about the king and interviews its author for the first in our Elvis pair: Elvis Presley: Baby What You Want Me To Do. Baird explains that "Writing about the final decade and a half of the life of Elvis Presley is, by any measure, a sad affair."
More Elvis! Baird digs into the back catalog for The Unmaking of Elvis…
The show was combined with a used-equipment flea market on Saturday, sponsored by the Northern California Historical Radio Society. A technical…
This year's Macworld Expo, held January 11–14 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, wasn't simply devoted to the latest twist on Mac OSX or tutorials on Photoshop CS. Approximately 40,000 Apple faithful paid $40 each to ogle the newest products from Apple and others in the same hall that had hosted the Audio Engineering Society's convention just a few months earlier.…
Five weeks ago we reported that Ray Kimber, of Kimber Kable fame, and his financial partner, Bruce Bastion, were in the process of bringing a new loudspeaker technology to market. DiAural, as they've named the technique, is claimed to eliminate what Kimber calls Doppler-encoding distortion---the modulation of high frequencies by low frequencies of higher…
The NPD Group reveals that the 2004 holiday shopping season could be challenging for retailers. "Nearly 9 out of 10 consumers say they are planning to spend the same amount or less than last year," say the researchers. That breaks down as follows: 69% of American consumers indicated they plan to spend the same amount this holiday as last year; 18% plan to spend less than last year; and 12% plan to spend more. On average, consumers tell NPD…