Among the maladies to which music lovers are especially susceptible, hearing damage caused by prolonged exposure to loud sounds is perhaps the most pernicious. When you're young, you normally don't think about the consequences of cranking up the volume, but if you do that routinely, you are sure to suffer some form of hearing deficit in your later—or, in some cases, not so later—years.

Glass isn't the first thing I would think of as an ideal material for speaker cabinets, but French manufacturer <A href="http://www.waterfallaudio.com">Waterfall Audio</A> disagrees. Its new flagship Niagara is a thing of crystalline beauty that boasts impressive specs.

When I profiled the B&W Zeppelin and Zeppelin Mini iPod sound systems in my Ultimate Gear blog, I got several requests for a real review. So I contacted B&W, which sent me both units to play with, and I'm happy to report that they both live up to the company's considerable reputation—once you get the settings right.

To paraphrase The Firesign Theatre, we're all A/V geeks on this bus. We can't get enough about Blu-ray players, high-def displays, receivers, speakers, room acoustics, content creation and distribution, and all the other elements that contribute to an exceptional audio/video experience. To feed that need, I'm delighted to introduce a new feature to <I>UAV</I>&#151;<A href="http://www.ultimateavmag.com/podcasts/">Home Theater Geeks</A>, a weekly, hour-long podcast in which I chat with the most important and influential technical experts in our industry about all things audio and video.