LATEST ADDITIONS

PRICE $1,614

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Highly compact steel sphere enclosures
Transparent sound quality
Big soundstage with no restrictive sweet spot
Minus
On-wall or near-wall placement well advised
Tricky subwoofer mating
Likes a lot of power

THE VERDICT
A sub/sat system whose great strengths are its midrange clarity, wide dispersion, and décor-friendly form factor.

The interaction between speaker manufacturers and the public they serve has changed markedly since the days when I was a longhaired college kid buying my first speakers. Back then, design ideas flowed in one direction, from the top down, from the drawing board to the sales floor—and if you bought a speaker, you nearly always bought a box speaker. Now speaker-design imperatives flow in both directions. With a greater variety of beckoning form factors, speaker buyers influence the design process simply by choosing the products that fit into our lives.

Punk. Rock. Reggae. Hip-hop. Ska. Dub. Soul. Jazz. Rockabilly. No, this isn’t a listing of all the sections in one of the only remaining cool record stores left standing; this is the breadth of the genre-bending legacy of The Clash. And the sonic scope of Sound System is set to prove The Clash may very well be The Only Band That (Still) Matters.

Advance ticket buyers also receive digital HD version of the movie

Regal Entertainment announced that Super Tickets go on sale today for director Peter Jackson’s highly anticipated The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which opens in theaters on December 13.

In a recent Ask S&V column, I answered a reader question about North American-made audio: Does anybody make audio gear over here anymore? One name I listed in my response was Canadian speaker-maker Paradigm, a company that manufacturers a wide range of speaker models, subwoofers, and audio electronics in a 225,000 square-foot facility located in Mississaugua, Ontario. Sound & Vision has rarely met a Paradigm speaker or electronics component from Paradigm’s sister-brand Anthem that it didn’t like, so the company is obviously doing something right. To get an overview of just what is happening under the roof of that 225,000-square foot facility, Paradigm’s marketing dept. invited me up for a day to check things out. Ready for a tour? Let’s go!