LATEST ADDITIONS

Without question, voice control is the hottest thing in audio. Tomorrow it will be something else. Today it is voice control. In particular, Amazon's Alexa is all the rage and is poised to appear in phones, cars, refrigerators, and pretty much anything else that is powered by electrons. But Alexa is really just the gateway drug to the Internet of Things.

For the first time ever, the percentage of free or paid streaming video subscribers in the U.S. has nudged past the number of paid TV subscribers at 68 percent vs. 67 percent, according to new research from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).

PRICE $5,005 as reviewed

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Tight, detailed bass
Excellent tonal balance
Spacious, cohesive soundstage
Minus
Sub has limitations in very large rooms
Narrow tower can be unstable on carpet

THE VERDICT
With modest but significant improvements to their flagship speaker line, Aperion Audio has again hit the jackpot in offering the sort of value that’s rare in today’s increasingly pricey audio marketplace.

Six years ago, I reviewed the first version of Aperion Audio’s then new Verus Grand speaker line. While this was a considerable step up from the internet-direct manufacturer’s previous, well-regarded budget-priced models, it still offered incredible value. As I concluded at the time: “If [the Verus Grand] impresses you as much as [it] impressed me, you’ll ultimately be a winner.”

This elegant, suspenseful adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, Our Kind of Traitor, makes for a marvelous companion piece to the recent excellent TV miniseries adaptation of the writer’s The Night Manager. Here, a bored and lost university poetry professor whose marriage is in crisis—one of le Carré’s endless supply of honorable and principled innocent civilians who, seeking purpose and redemption, allow themselves to become involved in international intrigue—is seduced into helping Dima, a charismatic money launderer for the Russian mafia desperate to defect to England and save his family.