Stereophile

This year's Home Entertainment Show in New York has just ended. If you had the chance to attend, what caught your ear?

I've been thinking about women. All weekend long. While that, by itself, is nothing unusual for me, here at Home Entertainment 2005, I''ve been thinking particularly about the small number of female enthusiasts within the hobby of high-end audio.

If you missed <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/105kh">Part 1 of this article</A> (<I>Stereophile</I>, January 2005), or it has faded in your memory, here's a r&#233;sum&#233;. (Readers who recall Part 1 with crystalline clarity, please skip to paragraph four.) The accurate measuring of loudspeakers requires that the measurements be taken in a reflection-free environment. Traditionally, this has meant that the speaker be placed atop a tall pole outdoors or in an anechoic chamber. Both of these options are hedged around with unwelcome implications of cost and practicality. To overcome these and allow <I>quasi-anechoic</I> measurements to be performed in normal, reverberant rooms, <I>time-windowed measurement</I> methods were developed that allow the user to analyze only that portion of the speaker's impulse response that arrives at the microphone ahead of the first room reflection. MLSSA from <A HREF="http://www.mlssa.com">DRA Labs</A> is the best-known measurement system to work on this principle, and both John Atkinson and I use it in the course of preparing our loudspeaker reviews.

It's not unusual for a high-end audio company to originate in another segment of the high-tech electronics world, but it <I>is</I> a bit unusual when the spin-off is a cable company. That's the case with Empirical Audio, whose founder, Steve Nugent, spent 25 years as a digital hardware designer for Unisys and Intel. The key is that, in addition to standard design work, he chased "the more esoteric sides of design, namely grounding, shielding, ESD (electrostatic discharge), EMI (electromagnetic interference), transmission-line effects, and power delivery." <I>Voil&#224;</I>&mdash;cable design.

Imagine two people who have been audiophiles for 20 years. When they first met, Audiophile #1 had just decided that he would do his best to buy a system that he could keep for the indefinite future, without anxiety about upgrades. Let alone get <I>off</I> the "equipment upgrade" merry-go-round, he never wanted to get on it in the first place. Audiophile #1 also decided that having a truly great music system in his home was more important to him than buying a new car every three years. He found a dealer who sold systems based on value rather than on price. He ended up both exhilarated and intimidated, not only at the amount of money he had spent but at how good his stereo system sounded. He then stopped messing with it, sat back, and enjoyed the music.

<I>We get so confused department:</I> Officially, it's day one of the show, even though we've already been here a whole day. But&mdash;as we keep having to remind ourselves&mdash;it's not all about us. Today was the day the showgoers arrived.

Day one of the Home Entertainment Show is always set aside for the press (and "the industry," which is an apparently elastic term meaning "everybody else"), but this year it seems as though there's more press than ever. Every press conference&mdash;and there was a steady stream of them&mdash;was standing room only and the halls were already thronged with showgoers. It looks like HE2005 is already a hit.