LATEST ADDITIONS

I was sipping my gin'n'tonic, watching a hologram of a scantily clothed dancer and soaking up some serious party ambience at <I>Stereophile</I>, <I>UAV</I>, and <I>Home Theater</I> magazines' annual CES bash, held this year at the Venetian Hotel's Vivid night club, when a tap on my shoulder snapped me back to business. It was jolly Craig Oxford, president of former Nearfield Acoustics, the company responsible for the balls-to-the-wall, cost-no-limit, Pipedreams loudspeaker system.

Sometime <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/011006mothers/">near the close of Sunday</a>, when vinyl was being slipped into sleeves and room treatments were coming down, I wandered my way to the end of a hall at the St. Tropez, where I heard such sweet music emanating from the LSA Group/DK Design suite.

Used by B&#246;sendorfer in their demo, the Art Audio Adagio has to be one of the most beautiful tube amplifiers made. If you see it and <I>don't</I> want it, you have no soul.

T+A's Siegfried Amft thinks different. That's obvious from his beautifully designed tube and solid-state products, an observation that cruelly ignores how good they sound. I was happy to see that Amft made it to the show, because I reckoned that meant he had something new and startling to demonstrate. He did: Criterion TCI 2 Active loudspeakers ($25,500/pair), sarcophagi incorporating twin carbon fiber 10" woofers in a selaed enclosure, a 7" specially tuned midrange cone, and a curved electrostatic panel that Amft claims can produce SPLs above 120dB "while maintaining superb membrane travel and distortion characteristics."

<i>Written in blue ink on the white space of pages of <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/homepage/index.html">Fast Company magazine</a>, while waiting for the plane, yesterday morning, at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.</i>

NASA announced Monday that Hubble reveals Polaris to be a triple star system.

Counterfeit products proliferate. Know your source, as we used to say in the '60s.