Fred Manteghian Blog

With the image paused, no one in the room saw anything amiss with the SED display from Toshiba/Canon. But the camera has a different take on things.

I remember sitting in a CES press conference sometime in the year $149 D.V.D. listening to Toshiba whine about how no one was making any money selling DVD players any more. But moments later, they were announcing new models with new features and even lower price points. I guess you can't blame them. After all they had a lot of competition back then.

I'd like to open with a joke. Two antennas get married. The wedding wasn't anything special, but the reception was amazing!

I've always had a thing for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's recordings. Their long standing relationship with Telarc is probably why. I've had a long standing relationship with Telarc too. Well before I was a reviewer, I was just a rabid stereophile (the avocation, not the magazine) and I read every issue of Stereophile (the magazine, not the avocation), cover to cover. Telarc and Delos recordings were always spinning on their reviewers' CD players. I bought a few, like <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/Respighi-Pines-Rome-Birds-Fountains/dp/B000003CT0/... target="new">Respighi's Pines of Rome </a>, Louis Lane conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and <a href=" http://www.amazon.com/Copland-Appalachian-Spring-Fanfare-Common/dp/B0000... target="new">Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man</a>, with Lane at the helm of the ASO once again. The recordings were excellent, No excellent is too tame a word. They were – they still are – exquisite. Expansive as the universe, as civilized as infinity, and punctuated with their trademark Tympani kicks that separated the boys from the men when it came to seeing whose audiophile tweaked system was better than whose.

The real prize in my two-channel system, at least the prize du jour, is the resurrection of the Stax SRX headphones and SRD-7 headphone amplifier. Well, it’s not really an amplifier, just a transformer. You wire it to the output of your real amplifier with these pretty cheesy (at least by audiophile standards) wires that are hard-soldered inside the unit. Then you screw down your beefier audiophile speaker cable (or in my case, the equally cheesy Radio Shack 16 gauge) to the terminals provided on the back of the SRD-7 and use a switch on the front panel to choose between headphones or speakers.

Just one "O" away from an Audi

It’s quite an amazing little device, when it works, and when it doesn’t work, it’s not its fault! That’s the best way to size up the wonderful little Ira Wi-Fi Internet radio from <a href="http://www.myine.com/ira.php">Myine</a>. Setup is easy. You just need a wireless router somewhere within range. If your router has security enabled, you can enter your password via the remote by selecting all your letters, numbers and special characters in the large, easy to read LCD screen of the Ira.