LATEST ADDITIONS

As I watched WAM Engineering's J.R. Boisclair give an advanced turntable setup seminar at last November's Capitol Audiofest, a light went off. I'm being figurative, but the lights did—literally—go off, and then on again, as I flipped the switch for Boisclair's presentation (see the above photo), which featured both screen time and an in-person lecture.

When I learned that I was to review the new seventh generation of Monitor Audio's Silver 500 loudspeaker ($3200/pair), descendants of the original Silver-series products launched in 1999, I thought back on what I knew about the company and then refreshed my memory. Monitor Audio was founded, in 1972, in Teversham, England, a town bordered by farmland located some three miles from the epicenter of its more famous neighbor, Cambridge.

I'm excited about the return of live music to New York City. I've attended several classical concerts in the last few weeks, and in a week or so, I'll take in a show at the City Winery: Suzanne Vega. I haven't yet made it back to New York's amazing jazz clubs—the Vanguard, the Blue Note, Smalls—but I look forward to doing so soon, especially to dropping in on my jazz local, Smoke, when it reopens in a few weeks in new, larger digs.

So far, as part of my quest to find good affordable box loudspeakers, I have reviewed 20 models, in the August, October, and November 1987, and January and February 1988 issues of Stereophile (Vol.10 Nos.5, 7, & 8, Vol.11 Nos.1 & 2). Nearly all affordable loudspeakers have to be used with a pair of stands: as these have an important influence on the integrity of the sound and tend to cost upward of $100 a pair for good models, this makes such speakers less of a bargain. This month, therefore, I review loudspeakers designed from the outset to be floor-standing: three from the USA—DCM's Time Frame TF1000, the planar-magnetic Magnepan MG2.5/R, and the Orpheus 808—and one from Sweden, the Rauna Balder. The prices are pretty closely grouped, with the DCM being the least expensive, at a hair under $1100/pair.

Peter Ledermann, founder and chief designer of Soundsmith, Inc., began his adventures in phono cartridges by reverse-engineering Bang & Olufsen's Moving Micro-Cross moving-iron cartridges for customers B&O had abandoned when it got out of the LP player business, and putting them into production. The B&O cartridges were of the direct plug-in variety; once they were no longer made, a worn or broken B&O cartridge would render a B&O turntable unusable.

Sol & Pat, J.S. Bach: Three or One, Britten, Young Apollo; Milhaud, Le Carnaval d'aix; Finzi, Eclogue*; Richard Strauss, Le bourgeois gentilhomme: Suite, Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande: Suite (arr. Nott); Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande and Fanny Mendelssohn, String Quartet; Felix Mendelssohn, String Quartets 2, 6.