Before I heard the Torus—the revolutionary “Infrasonic Generator” from Wilson-Benesch, the British hi-fi firm that put carbonfiber enclosures, drivers, tonearms, and turntables on the audio map—my rule of thumb about adding a subwoofer to a ...

I first encountered JL Audio at the 2005 CEDIA Expo—the event this respected manufacturer of caraudio speakers and electronics used to launch its entry into the high-end-audio and home-theater markets. To say I walked into ...

The high end is by and large a specialty market driven by enthusiasts—enthusiasts who don’t know the meaning of the word compromise. But what about the audio buff who doesn’t want to set his sights ...

the Krel LAT-1000 is Dan D’Agostino’s effort to bring the same kind of no-holds barred approach to speaker design that he has brought to his Evolution Series electronics. He led the design team and voiced ...

Have you ever had a reference component in your system for years and sold it because you felt that something else just had to be better? Perhaps my biggest audio regret is selling my Crosby-modified ...

By offering qualities we typically associate with audiophile speakers as well as those from the pro-monitor world, Pioneer’s EX Series bridges the divide between two distinct listening cultures. It combines a recordingstudio ethic, rigorous construction ...

Before you even hear a sound, you know this one is something different. Symmetric driver array speakers are common enough, and the cabinet, though a little unusual in shape and visual texture, is basically still ...

Kharma ’s Mini Exquisite is a perfectl y named loudspeaker . More than any other (super) model I know of, it offers a staggeringly seductive blend of fine detail and, yes, exquisite beauty. It will ...

A couple of reasons why most loudspeakers don’t sound like live music are that they are dynamically compressed and that they fail to accurately replicate hard transients. Ultimately, they just don’t have enough dynamic headroom ...

I’ve often visited Baltimore, which is where my wife Paige is from. I have felt patriotic at Fort McHenry, admired the musical traditions of the Peabody Conservatory, and had the crab cakes that are the ...

I just got back from a ten-day overseas jaunt that took me, first, to beautiful, richly historic Istanbul, Turkey, then to Amsterdan in The Netherlands, and finally to Breda in The Netherlands. (Those of you ...

Totem Acoustic is a Canadianbased company whose twochannel roots run deep. Although Totem first adopted a wait-and-see approach toward multichannel, its DreamCatcher system, recently rave-reviewed in TPV, proved that it was an exceptionally fast learner. ...

For those of you who don’t follow the automotive press, Bugatti’s new Veyron 16.4 is an insanely over-the-top supercar with unprecedented performance—and an unprecedented price. The Veyron sports 1000 horsepower, a top speed in excess ...

HP was right on the money when he recently concluded that we had “reached the limits of the descriptive vocabulary that has served audio writers so well for a generation.” I wholeheartedly agree. But of ...

This is going to be a difficult review for me to write. It isn’t because I find serious flaws with Lars Hansen’s The KING speaker system; no, it’s just the opposite—the speaker is so coherent ...