Scott Wilkinson

Last Sunday, my wife and I joined 25.8 million of our closest friends to watch the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards on CBS. So why am I writing about it here? Because this is <I>Ultimate AV</I>, and the Grammys are all about the best in audio <I>and</I> video. The audio part is obvious&#151;this is "music's biggest night" honoring the best recording artists, and all the performances are live, a technological tour de force in its own right. But the show is no less dedicated to video, both on stage and in the home.

Horn speakers have been around almost since the invention of electrical-to-mechanical transducer technology, and they still enjoy widespread use today, especially in commercial cinemas. But cinema speakers use horns that limit the vertical dispersion of their sound, whereas circular horns used by a few high-end speaker manufacturers radiate sound in a spherical pattern. Among the proponents of this approach is German maker <A href="http://www.acapella.de/en/">Acapella</A>, which introduced a new model to its lineup at CES, the High Violoncello II, which, like all Acapella products, is distributed in North America by <A href="http://www.aaudioimports.com">Aaudio Imports</A>.

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