Premiere Design

It seems that many high-end optical-disc players these days also serve as processors for digital-audio files from a computer via USB—for example, the recently profiled Ayre DX-5. Another new entrant in this emerging product category is the S7i from American digital-audio stalwart Wadia.

The title of this Ultimate Gear entry identifies the DX-5 as a "universal disc player"—the better to snag search-engine hits with—but American manufacturer Ayre Acoustics calls it a "universal A/V engine." Why? In addition to playing every available audio and video optical-disc format, this box also provides a USB port that allows it to act as a portal for the music files on a computer.

Departing from the spherical-enclosure paradigm as embodied in its La Sphère and L'Océan powered speakers, Cabasse this week announced the availability of a new floorstanding design, the Pacific 3SA. However, this speaker does incorporate the SCS (Spatially Coherent System) coaxial-driver design found in those models.

Last May, I profiled the new M-Class Blu-ray movie server from Kaleidescape, which lets you rip Blu-rays to a server's hard disk and stream their high-def content to any M-Class player connected to your home's Ethernet network. There was only one problem—the physical disc had to be inserted in an M500 player in order to satisfy Blu-ray's copy-protection requirements, which defeats the purpose of a movie server. Today, the company announces a solution to that problem—the Modular Disc Vault.

For those who think 3D on a flat screen is bogus, how about this? Swiss university École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is working on a camera that captures images in all directions at once—well, to be precise, all directions within a hemispherical pattern—and processes the resulting data to calculate the distance from the camera to each object in its visual field.

Update: This story now includes video of the inventor explaining the technology!

Audiophiles know well the name Dan D'Agostino, who co-founded Krell in 1980 and served as its chief engineer for 30 years. After selling the company in 2009, this audio legend started a new one—Dan D'Agostino Master Audio Systems—whose first fruit is the Momentum monoblock power amp, which will debut at CES next month.

Founded in 2009, one of the newest kids on the audiophile block is California-based Constellation Audio. Not that its principal players are newbies by any means—in fact, Constellation has assembled a "dream team" of engineers and designers to create unparalleled audio products, among the first of which is the Hercules monoblock power amp.