LATEST ADDITIONS

I may be the only reporter to take pictures of raw loudspeaker drivers at this year's CES. But I've always been fascinated not only by the products we buy, but by the parts that go into them. And SEAS of Norway is one the biggest suppliers of high quality loudspeaker drivers. These new DXT tweeters offer controlled wide dispersion. Note the rings molded into the front plates of both versions. These rings produce diffraction, thereby widening the radiation pattern above 7kHz&mdash;the first time to my knowledge that this audiophile boogie-man has been deliberately generated to <I>enhance</I> speaker performance!

PMC also showed these new in- and on-wall speakers. The Wafer 1 sells for $1199 each (on-wall version) and the Wafer 2 for $1799 (on-wall). The demo was a bit atypical of how the environment of the speakers in an actual installation, but they still sounded quite good. The speakers are actually loaded into transmission lines, despite their small size.

Here's the gear that drove the system above. The CD player is from DCS.

TACT, one of the first companies to offer sophisticated room correction, now adds Dynamic Room Correction. It adjusts the equalization to provide optimum response as you change the setting of the volume control. Older audiophiles might think of it as a sophisticated loudness control. The system will be built into the company's two-channel RCS 2.2 XP processor first, but will ultimately find its way into a redesigned surround pre-pro (now on hold pending the arrival of HDMI 1.3). TACT has also improved its user interface, making it faster to arrive at an optimum target curve.