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Onkyo may be best-known for its receivers and home theater-in-a-box systems, but the company planted deep roots in audiophile-grade hi-fi in the 1970s. As I recall, Onkyo had more street cred among audiophiles than Sony or Pioneer in the days before home theater ruled the roost.

Today at CES in Las Vegas Onkyo will debut a new range of elite stereo hi-fi components, with a style reminiscent of the company's classic models of the 1980s. All three components--the P-3000R preamplifier, M-5000R power amplifier, and C-7000R CD player--incorporate Onkyo's new Dynamic Intermodulation Distortion Reduction Circuitry (DIDRC), that is said … Read more

The late author Stieg Larsson can posthumously claim another victory: His "Millennium Trilogy" of thrillers topped both the print and e-book categories on Amazon this year. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" was Amazon's best-selling Kindle e-book, and "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" was the online marketplace's top seller in printed books, according to a year-end list released Thursday.

Those two books also topped those categories when it came to the most appearances on Amazon users' wish lists, but perhaps because of their gory subject matter were not the … Read more

First, I have to admit that a lot of high-end amplifiers are so ugly you'd have to be an audiophile to buy them. But there are more than a few truly gorgeous examples, like the Devialet D-Premier. It's French, after all, and the French know a thing or two about style.

In 2007, Pierre-Emannuel Calmel and Matthias Moronvalle decided to launch a new high-end audio company, Devialet, in Paris. The two men had both worked for Nortel's R&D department, and they weren't the least bit interested in crafting just another high-end amplifier.

It looks like they're off to a grand start; the Devialet D-Premier is a unique Class A/Class D hybrid design. Bona fide Class A circuits are only used in very high-end audiophile amplifiers, but Class A designs are extremely inefficient and consume huge amounts of AC power to produce low power output. Class D amps are highly efficient designs, but their sound quality falls short of the highest audiophile standards.

The D-Premier was designed to have the sound quality of Class A and the efficiency of Class D designs. … Read more

Twitter just released a year-end list of top trends for 2010, much as search engines like Google and Bing release their top queries. But it's a little different here.

Given Twitter's status as a chattery network of rapid-fire conversations, both breaking news stories and pop culture--including, notably, pop-culture phenomena with small, devoted cult followings--dominate the list. Twitter's algorithm for calculating top trends favors "novelty over popularity," meaning that a sudden, unexpected spike from the death of a C-list celebrity may ultimately outrank an ongoing major news story on Twitter's year-end list.

But in the … Read more

A set of headphones is often considered an audio accessory, but the truth is that this "extra" can outlast your MP3 player if you treat it right. After all, headphone technology doesn't evolve swiftly enough to warrant purchasing a new pair every year or so. As such, investing a hefty chunk of change in earphones isn't really a waste, and though it's true that $100 or less can get you a decent model, there are even sweeter-sounding options available for those with luxury-level budgets.

To that end, we've rounded up a selection of high-end … Read more

I've never heard anything quite like the Audeze LCD-2 before. This headphone somehow produces extraordinary clarity, openness, and articulation, but without exaggerated detail or annoyingly overdone treble. The Audeze LCD-2 is a game changer; no wonder it's getting raves from the online high-end mavens at Head-Fi. Audeze's co-founders, Alex Rosson and Sankar Thiagasamudram, are onto something.

The headphones feel great in your hands. Build quality is robust, but the design is nowhere as sleek as Sennheiser's high-end headphones. The LCD-2's impedance is 50 ohms, and the maximum power handling is a remarkable 15 watts, which corresponds to a superloud 133 decibel output! You'd be hard pressed to blow this headphone up by playing it too loud. The LCD-2's tonal balance is noticeably warm, but I never felt it was smearing detail or lacking in resolution. It also sounds great at quiet listening levels. Sure, one of the advantages of headphones is you can play music as loud as you want, but it's still nice to have the option of listening low, without losing detail or presence.

The LCD-2's unusual technology (planar magnetic, or orthodynamic) is currently only used by one other headphone manufacturer, Hifiman, and I raved about its HE-5 headphones last year. The LCD-2's huge headphone drivers (6.17 square inches each) are many times the area of any dynamic headphone I know of. Audeze's very large drivers project sound over most of your outer ears, and that may be the reason why the LCD-2 sounds more speakerlike than other headphones. It weighs a rather hefty 19.4 ounces (550 grams), but I found it comfortable over very long listening sessions. The LCD-2 is handmade in the U.S., with real lambskin leather-covered earpads, and real Caribbean rosewood earcups.

The LCD-2's headphone cable is detachable, via very secure mini-XLR plugs, and is therefore user replaceable. I opted for a Chain Mail 8, an audiophile upgrade cable from ALO. It seemed to enhance everything about the LCD-2's sound, which was awfully good with the stock cable.

The LCD-2's big drivers make bass, oh boy, do they make bass. If you really want to hear amazing bass, you have to get "Kodo: The Heartbeat Drummers of Japan" CD. The drums' big sound is beyond the abilities of most headphones, but here, over the LCD-2, the drumbeats were clear and powerful. Not the sort of flabby, thick, or overdone bass you get from DJ headphones, no, I'm talking about pitch-accurate, highly defined bass that also digs deeper into the very low bass regions than other full-size 'phones.… Read more

Amid a week featuring the debut of a fashionably small laptop, Dell has announced a line of products that move firmly in the opposite direction. The new XPS line of laptops are a high-end-targeted set of media-featured notebooks aimed squarely at the HP Envy and MacBook Pro crowds. The design, from a backlit keyboard to lots of anodized and brushed aluminum, feels like an upscale fusion of the Studio and Adamo lines. They aren't flashy, but they seem quite sleek, and Dell offers its arsenal of Design Studio tweaks for anyone looking to pop these XPS models up a … Read more

Not too many years ago, any laptop $999 or less was considered a budget machine, and spending between $1,000 and $2,000 was the standard buy-in for constructive computing. Starting around the same time as low-cost Netbooks came onto the scene, laptop prices across the board took a dive, and today's mainstream user can easily get away with spending less than $700 for a fully functional midsize laptop, or just a few dollars more to add high-end extras like Blu-ray or discrete graphics.

What this means is that one of the hardest things to find right now is … Read more

High-end audio, just like high-end everything else--cars, clothes, watches, boats--is in large part about style. Sure, high-performance is part of the appeal, but exquisite build quality and eye-catching designs are essential for market success.

With that in mind I put together a nice assortment of some of the more dazzling high-end components currently on the scene.

Magico's speakers are built with solid, massively inert structures designed to ensure the only sound you hear comes from the speaker's tweeter, midrange, and woofer drivers. No other speaker I've heard approaches Magico's resolution and precision. The company's latest designs upped the ante and now feature even more extensive frames designed to quell structure borne resonance to produce the highest-resolution sound possible.

Founded in 1991 by legendary audio designer Nelson Pass, Pass Laboratories, sells its unique amplifiers, preamplifiers and speakers throughout the world. The company has been based in Foresthill, California, since its beginning, and is widely regarded as one of the most innovative audio brands in the world. Many Pass Labs amplifiers, like my XA100.5 are pure Class A designs, and deliver breathtakingly beautiful sound.

The Ayre MX-R mono amplifier (you need two for stereo) is a looker, but pardon me for a second while I get tweaky and gush over the MX-R's zero-feedback and fully-balanced circuitry. Ayre's founder and chief engineer Charles Hansen invests vast amounts of time fussing over the tiniest circuit details, listening obsessively to eke out a sound that gets his designs ever closer to perfection. Some of the MX-R's resistors and capacitors are built to his specifications.

The Krell Modulari Duo Reference is a blatantly original, thoroughly masculine design, but at 44 inches tall, 11 inches wide, and 29 inches deep, it can still fit in average size rooms. Each speaker weighs 345 pounds, it's fair to assume the bulk of the weight can be attributed to its thick-walled aluminum construction. If the goal was to make an absolutely dead cabinet, I'd say Krell has done it. The speaker's design shows a clear aesthetic kinship with Krell electronics.… Read more