LATEST ADDITIONS

The beautiful Totem Tribe 5 is 48 inches high with four Montreal-made woofers and a tweeter with no crossover circuitry to pollute the sound. It is ported at both the top and bottom of the enclosure and can produce SPLs of up to 110dB into eight ohms. The speaker can function as an LCR, so you can use five or more of them in a surround system, though Totem also offers smaller complementary models. Price is $3000 with custom finish or $2200 if you're not as fussy. Want sub with that? The Tribe Sub sells for $1795 with outboard amp. It can sit on a pedestal, hide under the sofa, or be built into a wall.

The world-beating PTM series power amps from Audio Design Associates include six- and eight-channel models but nothing in the more popular seven-channel configuration -- till now. The PTM-7150, at 150 watts into eight ohms and 250 into four, uses a new thermal design that combines the company's traditional fan-cooled approach with heat sinking. The amp monitors itself and the fan kicks in when needed. This makes for a quieter, albeit larger, amp that needn't necessarily be banished to a closed gear closet. Price $10,000. Incidentally, the PTM is a tribute to ADA cofounder Peter T. McKean. We still miss him.

The most gripping thing at the MonsterCable press conference -- besides Noel Lee shifting his Segway back and forth within a foot of the edge of the stage -- was the Revolution 200 remote. For $249 it integrates lighting into the usual a/v functions, and as the picture shows, it looks crazy cool. Monster says its Max 3D eyewear is the only one to work with all 3DTVs. It costs $250 including the RF transmitter which provides greater freedom of movement than an IR transmitter. The FlatScreen SuperThin 300 is, at one inch, the thinnest power center for use behind a flat TV. Don't want your surge suppressor to burst into flames? The HTS 1700 ($400) has fireproof MOVs. Don't want your touchscreen devices to spread bubonic plague? CleanTouch is your hot ticket. Oh, and Monster HDMI cables now operate at a Simplay-certified 17.8Gbps. If you can see far enough into the future where such a thing might be relevant, your eyesight is better than ours.

T he rest of the industry may not be ready to abandon dome tweeters, but Sandy Gross and his new company, GoldenEar Technology, are using accordion-like High-Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR) high-frequency drivers in place of the ubiquitous domes found in 90-some-odd percent of the speakers currently on the market. The HVFR drivers work in a manner similar to an accordion and generate sound by squeezing a folded diaphragm from the sides rather than in an up-and-down motion. The result is a dramatically open, sublime sound free of any listening fatigue you might get from a lesser, standard driver – at least, that’s what I heard in the GoldenEar Technology booth earlier this morning. The HVFR tweeters are in the $1,249/ea floor-standing Triton Two Towers, the$499/ea SuperSat satellites , and the $249/ea SuperSat 50 satellites. GoldenEar Technology is also introducing a pair of powered subwoofers (ForceField 3 - $499, ForceField 4 - $699).