John Atkinson

The talented loudspeaker engineer is a man who is always in competition with himself. When PSB's Paul Barton put the finishing touches on his Stratus Gold model back in 1990 (footnote 1), I'm sure he had more ideas in mind that he could have used in a flagship design. Yet the Gold offered so much performance at such a competitive price&mdash;$2000/pair in 1991, rising to $2100/pair by 1997, then $2400/pair for the the Gold <I>i</I>, an evolutionary development&mdash;that it was not surprising that Barton applied his talents to developing ranges of more affordable speakers, such as the best-selling <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?580">Alpha</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?330">Image</A&gt; series.

I first became familiar with Israeli speaker manufacturer Morel, founded in 1975, back in the late 1970s, when they had a drive-unit plant in the UK. Their drivers have always been well-respected&mdash;I was mightily impressed with a sample of their T33 1" soft-dome tweeter when I had the opportunity to measure it a decade or so ago&mdash;so when I heard their Octwin 5.2 dual-speaker system at the 2002 CEDIA conference, I asked for a pair for review.

With Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio four years old as established media this fall, the two-decades-old Compact Disc medium is still well-established as the primary carrier for recorded music. (Yes, it is experiencing a significant threat from downloadable music files, but that is outside my bailiwick as a hardware reviewer.) <I>Stereophile</I> has therefore been paying attention to the high-performance one-box CD players that are available. In May, I wrote about my positive experiences with the $2950 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/840/">Ayre CX-7</A> and Brian Damkroger favorably reviewed the $2999 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/839/">GamuT CD1</A>, after having followed up his April 2001 review of the $5495 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/">Simaudio Moon Eclipse</A> player in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/index6.html">April 2003</A>.

While audio writers find the siren song of cost-no-object components an ever-present temptation, I do ask <I>Stereophile</I>'s reviewers to be on the lookout for affordable products that sound better than they have any right to. So when I listened to an inexpensive system based on Monitor Audio's Silver S2 loudspeaker and Musical Fidelity amplification at Home Entertainment 2002, held at the Manhattan Hilton in May 2002, I followed my own instruction and asked the US distributor of this English model to send me review samples.

An archive of articles that the late Michael Gerzon wrote for <I>Hi-Fi News</I> and <I>Studio Sound</I> magazines has been established at the <A HREF="http://www.audiosignal.co.uk">website</A&gt; of <I>Hi-Fi News</I> consultant technical editor Keith Howard.

The keyboard player looked at his watch. It was midnight. "Time for my break," he said. My heart sank.

The science of recording music is, to apply a metaphor from a very different context, akin to "breaking a butterfly on a wheel" (footnote 1). The art of recording is to make it appear as though that pinned insect could still take wing. I have been devoted to both the science and the art of recording music since 1965, when I was given a Grundig &#188;" open-reel tape recorder as a birthday present. You could even say that my evolving interest in audio and my current position at the helm of <I>Stereophile</I> date back to my finding out how different a Shure SM57 dynamic cardioid microphone sounded from a Reslo Ribbon, even in mono, even at 3&#190;ips, when captured on that Grundig.