LATEST ADDITIONS

Venture Beat magazine has reported that Samsung and Skybound Entertainment have started production on the first virtual reality movie made for Samsung’s $200 Gear VR headset.

Leave it to Dave Edmunds to always want to take things a little bit left of center. “I’ve never liked listening to albums, and I’ve never liked making them,” admits the Welsh-born guitarist and producer known for his modern rockabilly sensibilities (see Rockpile’s Seconds of Pleasure and solo hits like “Slipping Away” and “Girls Talk”). “I’m a singles guy; always have been.” That said, Edmunds agrees he found the right album-length formula for the 15 songs he compiled for 2013’s …Again (RPM), but he decided to shift gears for the just-released all-instrumental On Guitar… Dave Edmunds: Rags & Classics (RPM). “The album tracks are pretty similar to the originals, but you’re shocked when a guitar comes in instead of a vocal,” he explains. I called Edmunds, 71, across the Pond to Wales to discuss the one-man-band approach to Rags & Classics, delve further into his stark view on loving singles vs. LPs, and find out what he thinks the two best-sounding songs of the rock era are. Subtle as a flying mallet, indeed.

PRICE $11,855

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Reference-class sound reproduction
Near-perfect center- channel matching
Versatile dipole/bipole/double-monopole surrounds
Excellent finish quality
A bargain—for high-end speakers
Minus
Surround-mode change requires rewiring
Cheap for high end—but not cheap

THE VERDICT
A superb loudspeaker system from top to bottom—surely one of the best affordable high-end options available.

When you hook up a PSB speaker—pretty much any PSB speaker—you have a very good idea of what you’re going to get. To wit: balanced octave-to-octave response that fits a tight decibel window from the design’s lower limit to its upper; off-axis curves that are similarly smooth and “well bundled,” rolling off higher frequencies progressively at more extreme angles but without sudden discontinuities; impressive-for-size low-end extension without any enhanced, bass-sweetening pre-rolloff response hump; a reasonably unchallenging impedance curve for easy-to-drive amp-friendliness, and coherent, strong stereo imaging promulgated by carefully derived driver locations and spacings and by a diffraction-free cabinet design.

If you have a home theater, it's easy to see that commercial movie theaters are both your friends, and your enemies. On one hand, without them and the billions of dollars they generate, movie studios would never spend the hundreds of millions of dollars required to make a movie. We owe the content we watch at home to the commercial theaters. On the other hand, adversarially, these theaters get first dibs on all content, and we must impatiently wait for home media to eventually appear. Don't like waiting? Well, if things work out, you soon might be able to cut in line.