Stereophile Staff

There is practically nothing that has set high-end audio on its collective ear like the article Jonathan Scull wrote back in 1994 on room-tuning devices from Shun Mook. Not only did some readers dog-pile J-10, but two other <I>Stereophile</I> writers, Barry Willis and Sam Tellig, decided to take on the challenge. Required reading for anyone who wants to know more about <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/69/">The Shun Mook Affair</A>.

The benefits of more choice or an audiophile disaster? It seems that Sony/Philips' SACD and DVD-Audio are on a collision course in their race for the title of the next high-end audio format. If they decide to duke it out, we'll get to compare the two formats ourselves, but is this good or bad for the audiophile?

Imagine that you are a Canadian with a mid-sized accounting business. You have tons of data to keep track of, and have found the recordable CD to be an excellent form of storage: convenient, reliable, and cheap---until New Year's Day, when the cost of blank discs suddenly doubled. You may not have the slightest interest in music, but one of your basic costs of doing business has just skyrocketed because someone, somewhere, has allegedly made an illegal copy of a commercial music CD.

Let's talk cable dressing. Make mine vinaigrette! (And you thought I'd go for French . . . ) Cable dressing is actually a rather delicate issue that requires a certain leap of faith. The concept is so simple that even I can explain the science to you. But the leap occurs when you realize how the positioning of cables and interconnect can make a real difference in the sound of your system. In spite of this, I've seen power cords and interconnects tangled up in a hopeless mess at the back of some pretty serious components.

How can a reviewer possibly put a value on a loudspeaker as costly as the Wilson Audio Specialties X-1/Grand SLAMM? When he reviewed Wilson's WATT 3/Puppy 2 system ($12,900-$16,000/pair, depending on finish) a few years back (footnote 1), John Atkinson said that it was "one of the more expensive loudspeakers around." The Grand SLAMM costs almost five times as much!

The shock news on November 18, 1998---that the highly regarded British speaker brand Mordaunt-Short was to be closed down (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10316/">previous story</A>)---seems to have achieved the desired result. On December 30, Audio Partnership plc announced it was acquiring the Mordaunt-Short brand from TGI plc (Tannoy Goodmans International).

As this is filed, there are only a couple of days until the end of the year, but still plenty of time to get these predictions under the interconnect. You can find part one <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10054/">here</A&gt;, and part two <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10064/">here</A&gt;.