Premiere Design

With the rise of digital-audio servers, the role of digital-to-analog converters (DACs) is becoming ever more important. Those who want the very best DAC might do well to consider the DaVinci from Light Harmonic.

As I was researching my response to Xavier Beard's question about speakers from Aerial Acoustics, I came across the company's System 1 TheaterWall. This artfully designed, decidedly high-end speaker system surrounds a screen of just about any size with speakers for the left, right, center, and subwoofer channels.

Since 1985, Danish Gryphon Audio Designs has been well-regarded for its high-end audio electronics. But in the last decade, the company has expanded its portfolio to include speakers as well, foremost among which is the mighty Poseidon.

Founded in 1978, German maker T+A is well-known for high-performance, high-value audio products. New to the company's E-Series is the Music Receiver, which combines the other two products in that series—the Power Plant integrated amp and Music Player CD/digital-file source—into one chassis.

These days, earbuds are as important as speakers for delivering music to consumers, but most are woefully lacking in the sound-quality department. Japan's Final Audio Design intends to correct this shortcoming with its Piano Forte X-VIII series.

A couple of months ago, Steve Guttenberg wrote a short review of the Isabellina HPA LFP-V Edition headphone amp from Red Wine Audio in his Audiophiliac blog, implying that it could be the world's best. With the recent launch of InnerFidelity, our new sibling site devoted to headphones and other personal-audio products, I thought it especially fitting to profile this little gem here.

Online distribution of video content—especially high-def video—will never float my boat until the bandwidth available to most homes is way faster than it is today. According to Speedtest.net, in 2010, South Korea had the fastest average household bandwidth at 22.46 megabits per second, while the US was 30th in the world at 7.78Mbps—that's less than Latvia (18.02Mbps), Lithuania (15.81Mbps), and Liechtenstein (7.79Mbps). But even in Korea, streaming high-def—not to mention anything with even higher resolution, like 4K or UltraHD—requires some serious compression, which lowers the picture quality dramatically.

An incredible solution to this problem was quietly demonstrated in a hotel suite at CES this year by a company called R²D² ("Twice the Research, Twice the Development!"). The company's Hypernet technology bypasses the Internet completely, offering nearly unlimited bandwidth and instantaneous transmissions using the principles of quantum physics. Inventor Leia Organic Skydancer, love child of two spaced-out hippies, is a video artist and musician as well as a physicist and computer scientist who created Hypernet so she could effectively market her own material, including her first project, Music From the Hearts of Hyperspace.