LATEST ADDITIONS

Radio pioneer Reginald Aubrey Fessenden should be more widely celebrated for his place in media history, argue the folks at Tivoli Audio in their "100 Years of Broadcast" campaign (complete with free shirt and emblazoned SongBook radio for freeloading members of the press like myself). On Christmas Eve 1906, nearly a century ago, the Canadian became first person to broadcast music and speech over the airwaves. Marconi is often celebrated as the father of radio but telegraphy was his actual innovation. He was not the first to transmit music or even speech—he transmitted the letter S in Morse code. Fessenden's idea was to transmit music and speech as continuous waves. Edison listened to the idea and laughed it off so Fessenden pursued it alone. Since there were no radio receivers then except for ships at sea, the first-ever music broadcast went out from the coast of Massachusetts to ships in the Atlantic, as Fessenden played a Haydn recording and his own violin. Tivoli and a handful of tech historians assert that this broadcast became the basis for radio, television soundtracks and (if one overlooks the later leap from analog to digital) even music downloading. After all, Fessenden was the first guy to move music and speech from point A to point B without using a disc, a cable, or some other physical object. Tivoli's latest new product is the iYiYi, another iPod-docking compact system, and I hope to get one in for review when it becomes available in the fall for $299.

"Where am I supposed to put the center speaker" is a question increasingly asked by new owners of flat-panel sets like say, oh, Panasonic plasmas. Above the screen? Below the screen? No, to the sides, insists Panasonic, but the company proposes going beyond the usual "phantom center" surround-processing solution. The idea is to keep the center as a discrete channel but move the drivers into the left and right speakers. Each tower has a separate enclosure to hold the center-channel drivers, as you can see on the righthand side of this speaker, which I denuded before anyone could stop me. See more pictures and details from yesterday's Panasonic press event in the Gallery.

We were unable to measure some of the audio gear in the July issue. Here are the measurements for two of the systems, the rest will come later.

Pass around the Prozac. <i>24</i>, <i>Prison Break</i>, <i>The Unit</i>, <i>Lost</i>, <i>Alias</i>, and the <i>capo di tutti capo</i> of all shows<i>The Sopranos</i>, are over for the season (or in the case of <i>Alias</i>, forever). But the end of the school year doesn’t necessarily signal the death kneel it did back when a warm summer breeze shot me into a verse of “No More Teachers, No More Books.” Now, we have options.