Bang & Olufsen knows its customers value style and ease of use more than being the first on the block with the latest thing, so the Danish company tends to wait for the bugs to be worked out of new technologies before it embraces them.
From an audio standpoint, the CEDIA Expo used to be little more than a showcase for in-wall speakers and other products built mainly for multiroom systems and custom home theaters. But with the decline in home sales over the last few years, the custom market isn't so hot anymore.
The speaker world is anything but conservative. Think of the different types you can buy: good ol' cones 'n' domes, electrostatics, planar magnetics, ribbons, horns, pulsating spheres, and more, mounted in all sorts of enclosures or in no enclosures at all.
The world of custom home theater is less daring. Installers want speaker systems that sound great, play loud as hell for hours on end, place reasonable demands on amplifiers, and install easily. This is why you rarely see anything but cone 'n' dome speakers used in custom home theaters.
Of the companies catering to the custom market, BG Radia is one of the few that does things differently.
Maybe back in the 1920s, when Sound + Vision was called Superheterodyne Journal, we might have reviewed some giant tube amplifier that put out 2 watts at full blast. But other than perhaps some forgotten device from audio's days of yore, this storied publication has never tested an amplifier so small, so weak, so limited in utility as the Qinpu Q-2.
I'd expected a kind of This Is Your Life thing, where partygoers would be "treated" to a recitation of five decades of milestones. But the 50th anniversary party for speaker manufacturer KEF at the British Consulate in Manhattan was anything but a long look backward.
I often worry that people get the wrong idea when I praise a speaker for sounding "flat." By this I mean its frequency response is flat, which is a good thing. But if you ask the man on the street, I bet he'd equate flat sound with lifeless sound.
It's high time I explained what frequency response is and why flat frequency response is desirable in audio products. Not only will I explain why non-flat response is bad, I'll demonstrate it to you with some audio files I cooked up just for this article.
I had an ear-opening experience when I got to do a blind listening test of some vintage turntables at Vancouver, BC vintage audio dealer Innovative Audio this past summer.
I predict that 2011 will be for audio what 1962 was for the art world. In 1962, Andy Warhol's first solo shows in Los Angeles and New York swept away the prevailing aesthetic ethos of the era, demonstrating to the world that a Brillo pad box could be a work of art.
In order to get the transition between your subwoofer and your main speakers close to perfect, you need measurement gear. Measurement makes your sub setup faster and more accurate. Instead of listening to bass lines to gauge the evenness of your bass response, you just run a quick measurement and get a precise result.