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Please forgive my so very foul language, but when I walked into the Loiminchay room, I just had to shout: "What the FUDGE?" Seriously.

That's the truth.

The Loiminchay speakers look like nothing else I've ever seen. "I know nothing about this brand," I said to Montague Luxuries' Mark Montague.

"Well, that's because we're absolutely new," he responded.

The designer, Patrick Chu, is better known for his fine pens. "How did he go from pens to loudspeakers?"

"Well, he's also an audiophile and a collector, and everything he's interested…

Surprisingly, the Proclaim Audio DMT-100 loudspeaker is not nearly as imposing or, shall I say, all-up-in-my-grille, as I imagined it would be. It's actually kind of graceful. In fact, it has a sort of happy-go-lucky presence.

Hi-ho, wanna twist my tweeters? Okey doke. Feel like messin' with my midrange? No prob.

Designer Daniel Herrington seemed genuinely pleased with his loudspeaker solution. "This speaker is different, but it's not different simply for the sake of being different."

While Loiminchay's Patrick Chu creates trouble, locking…

Way back in the day, when I was just a wee li'l Stereophiler, taking orders for classified advertising in Audio Mart, I shared the most enjoyable telephone conversations with one advertiser in particular, Audio Advancements' Hart Huschens.

After only a few brief chats, I got the sense that Hart was a truly gentle and honest person. Six years later, I still have the opportunity to speak with Hart. Only now, we talk about different things: the Buyer's Guide and "Recommended Components," mostly. It wasn't until yesterday, however, that I had the real pleasure of meeting Mr…

The lovely little EarMax headphone amps listen along as ESE Lab's Rudi Korosec, standing here with Audio Advancements' Hart Huschens, takes some time to explain his latest phono cartridge. So new, in fact, it remains nameless, the ESE cartridge has a graphite body with a hyperelliptical stylus, a mass of 9g, and a recommended tracking force of 1.5g. Korosec seemed most pleased, however, with the cartridge's "extremely low impedance" of .85 ohms.

"Its graphite body makes it ideal for stopping vibrations," said Korosec, "and provides an excellent interface for many…

Also on display at the Audio Advancements' booth, the Altmann BYOB Amplifier, naked as it was, caught my attention. Why no clothes? The idea goes that doing away with the enclosure eliminates the chance for resonances which might otherwise corrupt the original signal.

And you'll never guess what "BYOB" stands for. In this particular application, it's: Bring Your Own Battery.

The Altmann Amplifier is powered by a basic car battery. Altmann, explained Hart Huschens, recommends Optima Red Top batteries, but any old battery will do. Even if it can no longer start…

With a sound that was seductively full-bodied and convincing, the Magico room was actually the first to lure me into a listening seat. And I stayed there for awhile, happily listening to music I was not at all familiar with.

"May I take your photograph, please, standing beside the speaker?" I asked Magico's designer Alon Wolf.

"Sure."

He smiled, I snapped. "Great. Thank you."

"Does it look better than the last photo you guys posted of me?"

I took a look and thought it over, "Um."

The three-way Magico V3 ($22,800/pair) made its US…

Harmony makes an RF extender for it, too. My wife asked, "Does that mean I can turn down his music from the other room?"

"Only if you have the remote," the…

Since Goller has been Mr. Loudspeaker at ScanSpeak for the last 20 years, developing new driver technologies and writing acclaimed peer-reviewed articles about designing loudspeakers, we believed him.

…

"It's a great desktop solution, especially if you have powered loudspeakers like your NHT M-00s!" he said. "It's perfect for computers!"

Yes, Leung ends pretty much every sentence with an exclamation point. That's because he's excited about hi-fi. He's especially excited about good hi-fi…