Premiere Design

Stunning or strange? One of these words is likely to come to mind when you first lay eyes on the 101 X-treme speaker system, the flagship of MBL’s Reference Line. And what a system it is, handmade to order in Germany and comprising a pair of approximately 6-foot-tall towers, each of which supports two utterly unconventional driver arrays in an open frame, and two subwoofer towers, each comprised of six 12-inch woofers, a crossover, and an amplifier broken into three ported birch and aluminum boxes that can be stacked or laid side by side as needed. (No lows left behind.)

Note to readers: See Clarification at the end of this article for an update.

Weeks before Onkyo and Pioneer announced the first Dolby Atmos-equipped AV receivers, we received a press release touting the “first ever immersive sound receiver”—the Auro-3D Auriga from Belgium-based Auro Technlogies. Intrigued by its high-end looks—and $16,700 price—we reached out to CEO and Auro-3D inventor Wilfried Van Baelen to learn more about the product and the Auro 3D surround-sound format at its core. Auro 11.1, which adds height and overhead channels to an existing 5.1 surround-sound setup, debuted in theaters in 2011 and today supports almost 500 screens worldwide, according to the company. Recent movies mixed in Auro 11.1 include Oculus, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, How to Train Your Dragon 2, and a number of foreign films.

The materials used to make speaker diaphragms are well established&#151;polypropylene, paper, Kevlar, aluminum, titanium, beryllium, silk, and even diamond, to name a few. So I was surprised to find a speaker system with diaphragms made of glass. Developed over nearly four years by a Japanese glass company called <A href="http://www.harioglass.com">Hario</A> (Japanese for "king of glass"), the Harion system is certainly intriguing, though the English-language website linked here has nothing about it, and the company did not supply much info, even after repeated requests.

One of the biggest audio sensations at CES wasn't a megabucks speaker—it was the Triton Two tower from GoldenEar Technology. The company was recently started by Sandy Gross and Don Givogue, who had been partners at Definitive Technology (Gross also co-founded Polk), to raise the bar on speaker performance and value. They seem to have hit a home run with the Triton Two, which is available in a stereo pair or as part of the TritonCinema multichannel system for a price that will surprise you.

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

Scandinavian design is often highly unusual. Case in point—the Helsinki 1.5 speaker from Finnish Gradient, which made the cover of the August 2010 issue of Stereophile.