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Attention all Audiophile Societies, have your society or club information posted here. To do so, e-mail Chris Vogel at vgl@cfl.rr.com and request an info-pack.

Chris Vogel suggests that if there is no Audio Society in your area, just take the initiative: "A simple monthly or bi-monthly meeting for listening and auditioning should do just fine. You can specify a theme such as CD players and have members bring one for auditioning. E-mail is invaluable for posting, updating, and sending reminders. Some type of food, snack, and/or refreshment is…

December 8, 2006
• Chinese Whispers Are Now Shouts, by Ken Kessler
• Tower Records R.I.P., by Wes Phillips

November 7, 2006
• New from Nagra, by Ken Kessler
• You Shall Knows Us By Our Trail of Unfiled Discs, by Wes Phillips
• This Month's Audio URL, from Wes Phillips

October 10, 2006
• Compared to What? by Wes Phillips
• Acoustic Energy WiFi Internet Radio, by Wes Phillips
• Soundmatters FULLstage Hd, by Wes Phillips
• Audica MPS-1 Personal Audio System, by Wes Phillips…

I decided to measure the 107 before doing any serious listening (something I usually do not do) so I could sort out the KUBE options and optimize the 107's response for my favorite placement. With the bass cutoff set at 18Hz (the setting I used for my auditioning), the 107 puts out energy down to 20Hz, which is as low as I can measure. In fact, bass output is so extended that the 107 can readily overload a listening room. Standing-wave resonances were excited in my room like never before, including an especially nasty one at 60Hz. The contour control cannot…

Dick Olsher first reviewed the R107 in Stereophile in Vol.9 No.7, and readers should read that review for a complete description. Briefly, bass is handled by two 10" pulp cone woofers mounted in small infinite-baffle enclosures within the R107's main box. The chassis of these drivers are coupled by a bracing bar to reduce the mutual vibration contribution to the enclosure. Their acoustic outputs are summed in a central chamber with the filtered "bandpass" energy emerging from the large port/grille on the enclosure top…

As part of the preliminary test work, the KUBE was subjected to some basic lab tests for crosstalk, headroom, distortion, and noise. These were all passed with no trouble at all; we then ran off some response curves at the various settings. For example, fig.1 (one horizontal division equals 5dB) shows the effect of the bass-extension control for a constant Q of 0.5, Contour set at Zero. Given that the speaker has a falling low-frequency response, increasing its extension requires various degrees of bass boost. On line 1, with the minimum extension of 50Hz, the…

Bass. A small word. But a profound one: bass is the base of all Western music, the underpinning that organizes the overlying structure. Basically speaking, music without bass is music without roots or soul. Yet how many loudspeakers do justice to that concept? "You don't understand bass," said a St. Louis reader in a recent letter, who concluded that I (once a professional bass player) was "either deaf below 60Hz, didn't have room for decent-sized speakers, or never listened to bass-heavy rock." (Not one of the three, as it…

The 107/2 KUBE is less complex than the one supplied with the original version of the speaker, which offered control of both LF Q and extension. The new equalizer has just two rotary controls,…

Have you noticed that when something is working right in the system, it seems hard to concentrate on the hardware? Such was the case here. By the end of the symphony, I had forgotten what exactly it was I was supposed to be listening for.

Oh yes, that bass discord. I put the third movement on again, this time trying to shut out the music. Mmmmm. Just as I remembered it from the original 107, the E-flat and F close but far, melded but differentiated—but there's so much more going on, so much wider a…