New Products

Bang & Olufsen have announced the BeoSound 5 Encore, the baby brother of their BeoSound 5 music system.

In a sure sign that the low-cost DAC is finding its place as an object of mass consumer desire, NuForce has released a 24-karat gold plated version of their uDAC-2 converter-and-headphone-amp combo unit

The SL300, the long-awaited flagship model in Chris 'Ludacris" Bridges' Soul headphone line, finally makes its way to major retail chains nationwide today, so pretty much everybody who can make it to a Best Buy or has an Amazon account should have a chance to see if Luda's put his money where your ears are.

There's a lot of action on the AVR front this week, with new models and upgrades from major manufacturers.

Parasound has packed a few more features into their Zphono moving coil/moving magnet pre, adding to the Zphono·USB ($350) an A-D converter and (obviously) a USB port, making it even more handy as a general-purpose interface for those with older and esoteric turntables (or pretty much any other stereo gear) looking to digitize their collections.

Back at CES 2011, Toshiba had promised to get a glasses-free 3D TV set of reasonable size to market by 2012, and true to their word the company rolled out a 55-inch model, the ZL2, today at Berlin's IFA consumer electronics show.

The 2011 edition of the massive Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin (that's "Berlin International Radio Show," or just "IFA" for those of us who don't speak German) comes to a close tomorrow, with an overwhelming number of products from some 1,400 exhibitors on display, from super-automatic espresso machines to soundbars. Our own Corinne Iozzio was there, and managed to get a look at some of the latest (and just plain weirdest) stuff on offer from the world of consumer electronics.