LATEST ADDITIONS

PRICE $2,446

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Flat BMR in lieu of tweeter
Clear sonic window into the midrange
Unusual dual-mono/bipole surrounds
Affordable price
Minus
Boxy vinyl-wrap enclosures

THE VERDICT
Cambridge Audio’s Aero reinvents the two-way loudspeaker in midrange-friendly fashion with excellent performance and value.

What if you needed two throats to speak? Sounds a bit cumbersome, right? But that’s how a two-way loudspeaker usually treats the human voice. Its drivers divide the midrange frequencies where the voice resides into two parts, sending higher frequencies to the tweeter and lower frequencies to the woofer. While the crossover varies from speaker to speaker, the frequencies that handle the voice usually get split right in the region where human ears are most sensitive to vocal timbre.

Of course, good speaker designers routinely surmount this obstacle to natural vocal sound, either by carefully tweaking their two-way designs or by going to three-way designs that dedicate a separate driver to midrange reproduction. But the three-way approach adds two more crossover sections, potentially leading to other troubled areas of reproduction.

Rail passengers in Los Angeles’ Union Station got a taste of what was billed as “the world’s first large-scale opera for wireless headphones.” Invisible Cities was based on Italo Calvino’s spellbinding novel in which Marco Polo describes fantasy cities to Kublai Khan. The production used Sennheiser’s wireless headphone and microphone technology to allow listeners wearing RS 120 cans to roam around the large public space “onstage” and commune with the performers.

This theater’s classy and tasteful design was an idea that had been rolling around in Joel Chasen’s mind for over 20 years. “I had always done all of my equipment purchasing, setup, configuration, programming, and tweaking on my own,” said Chasen. “For my ultimate theater, I wanted to go beyond the scope of what I could accomplish by myself and sought out professional help. However, it was important to find people willing to collaborate.”

In 1969, Americans first went to the moon. The challenges were daunting, including finding and training the men who would make those early, dangerous, pioneering probes into near-earth space—men who had, in the words of the Thomas Wolfe book on which this 1983 movie was based, “the right stuff.”

This is the compelling story of those first Mercury astronauts, who paved the way for that “One giant leap for mankind” moment. It’s also the story of uber test pilot Chuck Yeager—never an astronaut but the first man to break the sound barrier.