Premiere Design

Network music servers perform several distinct functions—acquiring and storing digital-audio files, managing and selecting what you want to listen to, streaming those files over a wired and/or wireless network, and receiving those files so the music can be played on a sound system. Most music-server products provide all these functions in an integrated system, but Scottish high-end long-timer Linn has taken a different approach. It's Digital Stream players, including the flagship Klimax DS, are strictly client devices that receive audio streams from the network and play them on any sound system.

Photo courtesy Surround Sounds, Perth, Australia

If you've been reading about home theater for any length of time, you've probably heard of Stewart Filmscreen, a family-owned company that represents the lion's share of the consumer and commercial projection-screen market. Its product range is vast, so I'll focus on three high-end home-oriented offerings—CineCurve, Director's Choice 2.0, and StarGlas.

During Michael Fremer's recent appearance on my podcast, he told the story about how he fell in love with a turntable he had reviewed for Stereophile—and how his wife had wholeheartedly approved of buying it, even though it cost as much as a high-end luxury car. That turntable is the Caliburn with Cobra tonearm from Continuum Audio Labs in Australia.

D&M Holdings is the corporate umbrella under which both Denon and Marantz live, so it's no surprise that the flagship Denon DVD-A1UDCI (reviewed by Shane Buettner for Home Theater) and Marantz UD9004 universal disc players are both based on a common platform. So why is the Marantz $1500 more than the already very-expensive Denon?

I first heard about British high-end manufacturer dCS many years ago when I read a white paper from the company extolling the audible virtue of PCM digital audio recorded and played back at 192kHz with 24-bit resolution. Since then, it seems that dCS has embraced DSD—the digital-audio format used by SACD—in its CD/SACD playback systems, including the all-in-one Puccini.