LATEST ADDITIONS

Life used to be simple. A preamp was a phono stage, a line stage, and the controls necessary to manage a system. Sure, there were exceptions, but for the most part you could say "preamp" and everyone knew what you meant. With the rise of the Compact Disc, however, phono stages became standalone components or optional extras, and most manufacturers concentrated on the line stage and controls, pursuing the ideal of "a straight wire with gain."

There was once an Englishman named H.A. Hartley, who was a contemporary of H.G. Baerwald, P.G. Voigt, P.K. Turner, and other men whose first two names are lost to us. Hartley was a capable designer and audio theorist, not to mention a gifted lecturer and writer&mdash;his literary achievements include a book on astrology (footnote 1), of all things&mdash;and he's often credited with coining the expression <I>high fidelity</I>. Most important of all, in 1928 H.A. Hartley teamed up with the aforementioned P.K. Turner to create an audio manufacturing company known as Hartley Products, Ltd. The Hartley company made electronics and loudspeakers, the latter of which included full-range coaxial drivers using energized field coils and, later on, quite powerful permanent magnets&mdash;just like their countrymen at Lowther Loudspeakers, Ltd.

In September 2005, for the first time, I attended the Expo of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA), in Indianapolis. Although I saw many familiar faces and companies, it was apparent that the event was dominated by a spirit very different from the one that pervades this magazine or the high-end exhibitions at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). That spirit, however, does suffuse the rest of CES, and is well represented at Primedia's own Home Entertainment shows. That spirit encompasses video, and a view of audio that differs significantly from that of traditional audiophiles. Multichannel surround sound is taken as read, and novel technologies are prized higher than the proverbial "straight wire with gain."

As we reported <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/012306fairuse/">last week</A>, the Senate Commerce Committee (SCC) held hearings on January 24 exploring regulations to insert "Broadcast Flags" and "Audio Flags" into broadcast signals and audio recordings&mdash;markers that would prevent electronic devices from recording the flagged material. What we did not anticipate last week was that the hearings would trigger an outpouring of common sense.

She totally pwns the Cat-Dancer.

Or should it be <I>Coq au Blam</I>? Some recipes make life a lot more interesting than others.

Not the usual "ain't they cute?" discussion, but a look into <I>Toxoplasma</I>, a parasite that has a strange behavioral action on rats&mdash;and perhaps on men and women as well.