LATEST ADDITIONS

Videophile Ready

Show Vienna Acoustics’ living-room-friendly Beethoven Baby Grand system to your hesitant significant other, and you might get the long-awaited nod you’ve been looking for. This is a speaker system an interior-design-conscious, non–audio enthusiast can make peace with.

The cat's been out of the bag for a month or two now, but today Roku officially announces an entirely redesigned line of streaming media players, featuring a smaller form factor, a few new content channels, Angry Birds - and, on the top-of-the-line XS, a motion-control remote. The new units should hit stores by the end of the month.

Last year, an audio dealer named Gordon Sauck called to get my permission to use a 1997 article of mine on his website. As I chatted with him, I realized there was a huge emerging trend to which I and most of the other guys who write about audio have been largely oblivious.

As a lazy musician (redundant, yes) with a bad back, it have nurtured an enduring fantasy, that of discovering a 3-inch-cube loudspeaker that weighs less than a kilogram but delivers the output of a 15-inch JBL D-130.