“The Menttor is a plug-and-play 5.1 surround system, but here it is through headphones, and therefore may be of interest to many who like music, movies, or TV at hours when others in the home are sleeping. This quite large, but very light, headphone system, has 6 drivers, and the amplifier/DAC box, which is very small, has a Dolby Digital/DTS chip, and 6 channels of amplification…”

“I’d had one of these gadgets operating when I was called by the Terk PR agency to ask if I wanted to play with the Wavemaster 30. By “these gadgets” I mean a box that sends audio and video wirelessly to a similar receiving box in another room. The original was an RCA that I bought after seeing it at a Thomson dealer show…”

“Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) have become a part of computer operation over the last few years, and have probably prevented data loss in many instances of power interruptions. Here we have the next stage of evolution, the Audiophile Power Supply, this one the largest and most expensive model in a line of three, with further variations in battery power also available…”

“Like most of the first wave of MP3 players to hit the market, the RCA Lyra is a very compact portable device, smaller than most cell phones, aimed at dethroning the discman style CD player from portable supremacy. Whereas some portables, like Creative Labs’ Nomad, use computer style hard drives for file storage, the Lyra falls into the smaller, less expensive category of players using small, removable chip based memory cards…”

“Over the past few years, the number of video sources has multiplied much more quickly than the number of A/V inputs on most televisions. It’s not uncommon for people to have three or more A/V sources: DVD player, VCR, satellite receiver or cable box, maybe a LaserDisc player and videogame console, and, from time to time, a camcorder…”

“For audiophiles, listening rooms are a bit like the weather. We talk about them, but few of us do much about them. We might experiment with speaker placement and listening-chair position, and some ambitious souls try to tame room problems with products like ASC Tube Traps. But not many of us go beyond that….”

“High end audio gets away with murder. By the standards of the non-audiophile, most of the stuff we buy, and what we pay for it, can be explained only by a form of selective dementia affecting us in all areas having to do with reproduced sound. How many other industries cater to a demographic as fanatical, as restlessly compulsive, and as willing to suspend its collective disbelief? The answer may lie in another question: How many businesses are charged with selling something as slippery and unquantifiable as the aesthetics of sound?”

“Power conditioners are one of those products which teeter on the edge of mainstream audio acceptability these days. While they probably have a better reputation than carbon fiber shelves or ebony pucks many audiophiles would lump them in the same shady category, labeling them as the foolish toys of misguided, obsessive compulsive and moderately paranoid audio freaks….”

“Andrew Marshall’s original Imager design was quite straightforward: a circular neoprene ring that surrounded the tweeter and absorbed energy that would otherwise have been radiated along the speaker baffle and re-radiated milliseconds later at the listener when it reached the edge. The design was sound, and 5000 pairs were sold with not one consumer complaint or return, and a plethora of praise for the improvements wrought with normal direct radiating box speaker designs…”

“I reviewed and ultimately acquired the Grado SR125 headphone almost two years ago (Smr 95), and have since used it in concert and session recordings for monitoring. The thing I’ve always liked about this phone is that it sounds more like speakers than any other I’ve heard in its timbral balance; other headphones tend to be rather bright and spitty by comparison…”

I first discovered these acoustic absorbers at the Montreal Festival du Son more than a year ago, as demonstrated by genial Yves Boudreau, about whom I have a brief anecdote: at this year’s show I ran into Yves for the third show in a row, his display in the main ballroom just over the way from ours for AIG Imagers, recordings, etc. He greeted me warmly, saying, “Ah, Mr. Marshall, how are you?” My reply was, “Fine, but please call me Andrew…”