LATEST ADDITIONS

YG's cute Carmel 2 speaker is featured on the new issue's cover and is exhaustively reviewed by John Atkinson inside. But the meat in our December issue is our annual "Products of the Year," where the magazine's writers and editors vote for the products that impressed them the most in the past year. There are some surprises, not the least of which is the great showing made by some very affordable components.

But wait, there's more...

At some point within the last few years of his life, the late Ken Shindo designed an outboard phono preamplifier—a decision perhaps made inevitable by his earlier decision to answer popular demand with line-only versions of the Aurieges and the more upmarket Vosne-Romanee preamps...

The EAD DSP-1000 III is housed in a 2.5" high, U-shaped chassis with a brushed-aluminum front panel. The cover is made of solid, 1/10"-thick steel with a nice "powder" finish, giving the unit an expensive feel. A pushbutton standby switch sitting below a green LED indicator sits at the panel's left. Even when set to Off, power is maintained for the decoder's circuits, but the digital inputs and analog outputs are muted. To the right, three pushbuttons allow selection of one of the three digital input sources (TosLink, 750 ohm coaxial, or glass optical interface). Like the EAD DSP-7000 unit reviewed by J. Gordon Holt and Steven Stone (Vol.18 Nos.1 & 5), the DSP-1000 accepts any of the three sampling rates: 32kHz, 44.1kHz, or 48kHz. Toward panel center is a lock light that illuminates when a digital data link is established. HDCD decoding occurs automatically whenever an HDCD disc is played, causing the front-panel HDCD indicator to light. No remote is available for this decoder.

Tricker tweets? I know, Halloween has already come and gone, but I just had to use that because this little speaker has a trick about its tweeter. The Spectrum Audio 108cd is constructed of ¾" MDF for the baffle and ½" MDF for the sides, with a very–high-quality black ash vinyl covering all the way around. (A brown ash finish is also available.) Rapping on the cabinet results in a hollow bonk, rather than a solid thud.

Saturday, November 14, 1–6pm: VPI Industries (10 Riverside Lane, Holmdel) will host an Open House/Listening Party. Guests will be able to enjoy four rooms, each furnished with a system that has been carefully optimized for the specific listening environment. The event will highlight two new pieces of electronics: the Luminous Audio Arion Phonostage (above) and the Fern & Roby Integrated Amplifier, both engineered by Mike Bettinger of Bettinger Audio. Manufacturer representatives from all three companies will be on hand to answer questions and demonstrate the products.

Let's go back a few years. Well, more than a few, actually. The electronics end of high-end audio consisted of two companies—Marantz and McIntosh. If you were not up to shopping at their stratospheric price level—even though the industry hadn't yet invented components priced to compete with automobiles—you could always fall back on Dynaco, the poor man's high end in kit form. You hooked all this together with two-dollar connecting cables and 16-gauge zip cord purchased from the local electrical supply house, or—if you felt particularly flush—you'd spend a few (very few) bucks more at Fred's Stereo for the cables with the fancy molded plugs. Hoses were used for watering the lawns.