Premiere Design

As anyone interested in high-end audio knows, balanced signals are far superior to unbalanced ones because of their ability to reject induced noise and interference. German newcomer BMC knows this well—in fact, the company name stands for Balanced Music Concept. Its products are distributed in the US by Aaudio Imports and include the M1 monoblock power amp profiled here.

Online distribution of video content—especially high-def video—will never float my boat until the bandwidth available to most homes is way faster than it is today. According to Speedtest.net, in 2010, South Korea had the fastest average household bandwidth at 22.46 megabits per second, while the US was 30th in the world at 7.78Mbps—that's less than Latvia (18.02Mbps), Lithuania (15.81Mbps), and Liechtenstein (7.79Mbps). But even in Korea, streaming high-def—not to mention anything with even higher resolution, like 4K or UltraHD—requires some serious compression, which lowers the picture quality dramatically.

An incredible solution to this problem was quietly demonstrated in a hotel suite at CES this year by a company called R²D² ("Twice the Research, Twice the Development!"). The company's Hypernet technology bypasses the Internet completely, offering nearly unlimited bandwidth and instantaneous transmissions using the principles of quantum physics. Inventor Leia Organic Skydancer, love child of two spaced-out hippies, is a video artist and musician as well as a physicist and computer scientist who created Hypernet so she could effectively market her own material, including her first project, Music From the Hearts of Hyperspace.

In Part 1 of this report on my visit to Runco to see the D-73d 3D projector up close and personal, I described its LED illumination and use of linear polarization to isolate the left and right images. Now, I'd like to discuss the alignment of its dual projection engines, its color features, and its outboard video processing.

In this blog, I've written about speakers with glass enclosures, such as several models from Perfect8, and even speakers with glass diaphragms, such as the Hario Harion. But I've never before seen glass speakers like those from Greensound Technology, in which a single, freestanding sheet of glass serves as the (almost) full-range diaphragm.

After designing and building direct-radiating speakers for over 20 years, Markus Duevel decided to try a different approach. Years of experimentation resulted in a unique combination of horn loading and omnidirectional radiation, and Duevel now offers several models, including the flagship Sirius.

Last year, I profiled the incredible Fenice speaker from Sonus Faber—a model that is now called "the Sonus Faber" due to a legal dispute over the name. Despite this name change, the company is applying what it has learned from that no-holds-barred flagship to other, more affordable models, such as the Amati Futura.

Zu Audio is well known for relatively affordable high-performance speakers, so it came as a bit of a surprise to see—and hear—a new, high-priced flagship from the Utah-based company at CES (actually, T.H.E. Show) last January. The Dominance raises the bar for Zu and gives other ultra-high-end speakers a run for their money.