Steve Guttenberg

It's not just cables anymore.

It was in the late 1970s when Noel Lee, a laser-fusion design engineer, started a little company, Monster Cable, which soon spawned, well, the entire high-end audio-cable industry. Over the decades, Monster maintained their dominance in the cable market as it branched into power conditioners and M•Design home theater furniture. Now, with Monster Music, they're jumping into the record business with a line of High Definition Surround SuperDiscs. Noel Lee's passion for multichannel music—and frustration with the stillborn SACD/DVD-Audio formats—pushed him to extract the best sound from Dolby- and DTS-encoded music. Monster Music claims that the SuperDiscs are the first music releases certified by THX for sound quality.

Great balls of fire.

Anthony Gallo Acoustics' speakers had me thinking about the old Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme. If you'll recall, after Humpty took a nasty fall and was smashed to pieces, all of the king's horses and men could never make him whole again. Following my cracked-up analogy, two- and three-way speakers break up the sound, sending it through woofers, midranges, and tweeters (and still sound great), but they can't ever really make the sound perfectly whole again. That's why full-range, single-driver speakers are the Holy Grail for some audiophiles. Enter Anthony Gallo Acoustics' latest set of balls, the new A'Diva Ti satellites, which get awfully close to that ideal. Heck, the wee A'Diva Ti is almost full range. Its 3-inch titanium/paper driver covers all frequencies from about 90 hertz to 22 kilohertz!

I could easily fill pages of this magazine with a complete list of Phil Ramone's credits and achievements, but I'll stick with this condensed rundown. He's won 12 Grammy Awards and one Emmy, and he's worked with a virtual who's who of music: Burt Bacharach, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Chicago, Gloria Estefan, Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, Elton John, Quincy Jones, B.B. King, Madonna, Luciano Pavarotti, Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, James Taylor—and those are just the highlights. Ramone is chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He is also a trustee of the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.

Body and soul.

I don't think I've ever before referred to a speaker as "sexy," but Sonus faber's new Domus line is definitely hot stuff. Yeah baby, the Domus Series' enticing curves—sheathed in supple black leatherette, poised on spiked feet—will get audiophiles all hot and bothered. That's because they make for pretty sexy sound, too.