Premiere Design

When I came across the website of Hungarian speaker maker Art & Voice, I could only gape slack-jawed at the incredible variety and artistry of its offerings. As the story goes, when the company's founder brought home some new speakers, his girlfriend immediately rejected them because they looked like two large coffins in the middle of their living room. This disappointing outcome inspired him to build speakers as works of visual as well as aural art.

This year's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest saw the introduction of many new products, including the Amadis speaker from Verity Audio. The 3-way Amadis is third in Verity's speaker lineup and continues the design philosophy of placing a rear-firing woofer in a completely separate, ported enclosure.

Known primarily for high-end equipment racks, Italian Arcici also makes some beautiful turntables. Shown here is the Alba with Lyla tonearm, the least expensive model that retails for 14,000 euro (about $19,500 as of this writing), and like the other Arcici turntables, all setup instruments and gauges are included.

And now for something completely different—a turntable shaped like a piano with a tonearm made from a violin bow. Italian maker Horo calls the WJE168—named in honor of jazz legend William J. (Bill) Evans—a "tunable turntable."

I have seen the future of television, and it is Google TV. On Wednesday, I attended a demo of the much-ballyhooed service as well as a new suite of products from Logitech that brings it to consumers in a simple yet sophisticated way, and I was highly impressed

I had not heard of German high-end speaker maker Lansche Audio until I received a press release announcing that Aaudio Imports is now the US distributor for its products. First to be available in this country are four very expensive models that all feature Lansche's Corona Plasma Tweeter.

Most speakers include drivers mounted on one or more faces of an enclosed box. But a few speaker makers take a different approach often called infinite or open baffle, in which the drivers are mounted on a flat board with no enclosure around them. One such company is Accent Speaker Technology, whose Nola brand includes the flagship Grand Reference V.