We walked into the room and I raised my arms into the air and shouted: “Holy shit! The world has come to an end, and we are in heaven!”
Inside were dozens and dozens of long picnic tables, beer garden style, but dressed up for the occasion in white tablecloths. Atop each table was a tree of pretzels, a platter of cheeses and meats and mustards, baskets of…
The company wanted to design something a bit sexier, a bit more modern, explained Harbeth’s Alan Shaw.
While he admitted that reasons for selecting one loudspeaker over another are not always rational, he believes a loudspeaker should be used in the application best suited to it. The Monitor 20s are optimized for nearfield monitoring in desktop sound- and video-editing.
Still: “‘Sexy’ is really important,” said Shaw.
I enjoyed a stimulating conversation about the priorities of a loudspeaker designer, the applications in which a speaker is used, and the difficulties of sound- and video-editing.
The first question Shaw wants answered about any particular loudspeaker is: “What loudness level is it optimized for?” From that, he can tell a lot about a speaker’s abilities and the priorities of its designer.
“If I get a strange look, as though [the designer] is wondering why I would want to know such a thing, then I start to feel…
In development for over two years, the MD 806 provides access to FM, DAB, and DAB+, as well as Internet radio stations via its onboard WiFi antenna or LAN, and locally connected music collections (MP3, AAC, FLAC, WMA, Real). Its 3.5” touchscreen displays metadata, genre, bit rate, codec, and sampling rate for the playing track, while personal audio collections (accessed through a local network or USB connection) are navigable by artist name, album name, or musical genre.
…
"Take a picture of me stroking this gorgeous thing," I said to Rosemarie.
"Yes, boss," she sighed.
Don’t like orange lava? (What’s wrong with you?) Potential owners can customize their Mera ELBs. Pick your favorite colors and clean away.
“Do you have any new products?” I innocently asked Hans-Ole Vitus, Vitus Audio’s uncompromising founder and designer.
His eyes went wide.
“Yes. I hadn’t slept for two weeks leading up to this show because I’d been worrying about all the new products.”
The RI-100 ($12,000) is the first new component in Vitus’s Reference series. It uses a brand new transformer design, and provides 300W RMS into 8 ohms running in class-A/B mode. The user has the option of adding a DAC, headphone amp, and…
I know it’s just marketing talk, but I have to admit that I like it.
The new Dali Fazon F5 (1499) uses a 1.1” dome tweeter and two 5” mid-woofers, while the cabinet is curved to avoid any parallel sides and prevent standing waves. Special spring-loaded terminals developed by Dali work together with the speaker’s integrated base to neatly conceal speaker cables. (Because, really, who wants to see speaker cables?) In…