Stereophile Staff

On Monday, July 2, 2001, Primedia announced that it has agreed to acquire emap usa from Emap plc. This transaction, which will create the second largest magazine company in the United States, is currently under a customary regulatory review. It is expected to close during the third quarter of the calendar year.

As John Atkinson puts it, Meridian usually does things "their way," putting amps and DACs inside of speakers in an all-out attempt at "re-creating the original soundfield, no matter how many speakers and channels it takes to do it right." But as Atkinson finds, the Meridian 518 Digital Audio Processor might be the company's most perverse product: "The $1650 518 offers digital inputs and outputs only. It can digitally perform gain and source selection; it can change data with one digital word length to data with another; and it does all these things with 72-bit internal precision." So JA asks, "How does the 518 fit within a conventional high-end audio system?" Read along as he figures it all out.

As Michael Fremer reports, critics have universally hailed Infinity's $8k flagship Prelude MTS. But can the success of the MTS trickle down to the lower price points? For his review of the $2000/pr Infinity Intermezzo 2.6 loudspeaker, Fremer set out to determine if the more modest sibling is a "worthwhile chip off the old block or just a marketing divot."

In his The Fifth Element #2, John Marks discusses in detail how to use common household items to render some audiophile magic. Marks explains, Aall you need is a very long piece of string, a tape measure, two bits of masking tape, a quantity of small self-adhesive removable note papers, and later, perhaps, a trip to the fabric store."