John Sciacca

There are those marquee brands in the high-end world that carry instant name cachet and immediately call to mind cost-no-object designs that most mortals can only aspire to owning. Dropping names like Krell, McIntosh, Trinnov, and Wilson Audio lets fellow AV aficionados know you’re familiar with truly high-end. Mark Levinson is a company that definitely belongs on that list of names, and with the company’s 5000 Series of products, they are trying to make membership in the audiophile owners’ club a bit less daunting, and also attract the next generation of music loving audiophiles.

While MartinLogan is definitely known for its large, electrostatic speaker panels, they also make some wonderful sounding in-wall and in-ceiling speakers. The Stealth Series uses a 60% larger version of the company’s Folded Motion XT tweeter than that found in the lower-end ElectroMotion series. The tweeter can also be easily rotated to insure that it is always correctly positioned – vertically – whether the speaker is being used horizontally or vertically. The Vanquish – being held in the photo – is the in-ceiling version and features a unique selector switch that allows the installer to optimize the speaker for either left, center, or right and front or rear use, ensuring that it will minimize interactions with the nearest wall.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard about Husqvarna’s Automower robotic lawnmower, my first thought was, “Well, that’s stupid.” I mean, why would someone need a Roomba for their lawn? Dumb.

Then I thought about it a little longer and started to weight the cost of the Automower versus my personal time and cost of cutting the grass or what I have been paying someone else to do it, and how nice it would be to come home and always have a perfectly groomed lawn, and Automower started to make a lot more sense. Then when I started to think about all the grief I get from my lawn guy – broken sprinkler heads, not coming for weeks at a time, yearly price increases – I started getting really excited about the prospect of letting a robot cut my grass.

Likely no audio company exhibiting at CEDIA is as well known for digital audio as Meridian. The company pioneered and was built-on the idea of maintaining an digital signal path; keeping the signal in the digital domain from source to speaker and at every step in between. And while this is terrific in an all Meridian system, it doesn’t work so well when trying to integrate with other products.

Now Meridian is releasing the new 258 eight-channel power amplifier that will allow people to enjoy Meridian’s terrific sound quality with any speaker of their choice. The new high-performance, cool-running Class D amplifier comes in a svelte 1U rack mountable chassis and is rated to deliver 100-watts per channel into 4 ohms or 70-watts per channel into 8 ohms.