LATEST ADDITIONS

PRICE $50

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Easy to install
Tames unwanted vibrations
Minus
Why aren’t these standard issue?

THE VERDICT
If you have touchy neighbors who complain about vibrations from your subwoofer, you need these in your system.

I love bass, always have, always will. The same can’t be said for my wife, who constantly tells me, “Turn it down. You’re going to wake the dead, or worse, go deaf!” Part of my problem is that my home rests on a raised foundation with a wood subfloor underneath my carpet, which means my dual-subwoofer setup transmits plenty of vibrations from the subwoofer to the floor, which then resonate through the rest of the house. In fact, on certain low-frequency scenes in movies, you can literally see my windows vibrating. But is this really a problem?

In case you haven't noticed, a beach volleyball tournament is going on, apparently in some large city with a beach. This tournament, which includes miscellaneous other non-beach volleyball events, is on TV. Also, in case you haven't noticed, the quality of the TV audio feed is, um, variable.

Every year more than a million people take in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular in New York City, a holiday tradition featuring the iconic Rockettes that has been staged annually since 1933. If you haven’t seen the show, it is a spectacle bursting with talent, riveting choreography, live music, pyrotechnics, electronic wizardry, and larger-than-life visuals.

Fourteen years is a very long time when talking about technology. So much has changed since then, yet some things remain oddly the same. Fourteen years ago, Ken Pohlmann and I wrote an article for Sound + Vision magazine comparing Sirius and XM. You would think that they have changed immensely since then, but some things haven’t. Back then, there were two companies. Was there a difference in sound quality? We definitely had a strong opinion then, but since the companies merged in 2008, could there still be a difference?