LATEST ADDITIONS

Once upon a time, several professors and associates from a small college in Fairfield, Iowa, formed an audiophile company named Enlightened Audio Designs. More widely known by its initials, little EAD created state-of-the-art 2-channel equipment whose performance rivaled products from much larger companies. When it became clear that home theater would become a major force in the market, they jumped into it with gusto, producing the TheaterMaster audio processor, SwitchMaster video processor, Theater Vision LD transport, and PowerMaster amplifier—all within a year of the first multichannel product rollouts.

Listening outside the pod.

Mirage's VP of engineering, Ian Paisley, went bipolar way back in 1987. Hold on a sec, let me restate that: Paisley designed the first commercially successful bipolar loudspeaker, the Mirage M-1, in 1987. That speaker garnered raves in all of the audiophile mags and put Mirage on the map. Ah, but do bipolar/wide-dispersion speakers always produce great sound? It all depends. People have criticized some omnidirectional speakers for their overly diffuse, vaguely defined imaging. While I've never owned a set of Mirages, I've been a fan of this sort of speaker since I bought a pair of "direct/reflecting" Bose 501 speakers in '76. Hey, I was still wet behind my not-yet-golden ears, and Bose's dispersion concept caught my fancy. My Bose affair was a quickie, and I eventually settled down for a long-term relationship with a pair of Quad ESL-63 (dipole) electrostatic speakers.

With the Showcase pre/pro-and-amp combo, Krell hits a new low—price point, that is.

Much is made of the intense competition that goes on in the receiver game, and understandably so. For the most part, these are companies that have piles of money to spend on advertising, have the resources and inclination to bring out new models every year, and have hordes of accountants and marketing types to keep watch on things likemarket placement, pricing, competitor activity, and so on. But what about the healthy (and growing) competition in the separates arena, especially at the lower (all things being relative) price points? It may not draw the receiver war's headlines, involve a fraction of the corporate expenditure and model turnover, or feature dueling laser shows from multilevel booths at industry trade shows. But, make no mistake, the competition here is no less intense, no less important to the industry as a whole, and no less beneficial to its particular crop of potential buyers.

Palm-size jukeboxes that hold hundreds of hours of MP3 music on an embedded hard drive are no longer a novelty. Now Archos has taken the category to the next level by adding a 1 1/2-inch color LCD, the ability to store and play photo slideshows or highly compressed but full-motion video, and direct A/V output to a TV.