While not the last word in resolution, these small and affordable monitors excel at providing detail at low to medium listening levels (which is not an easy thing). They are “exceedingly musical,” however, and you may not miss those occasional details. If you’re a beginning audiophile or are building a second system, we “can’t recommend them highly enough.”

These small and relatively affordable monitors from Wisconsin surprised us their precise imaging and their ability to completely disappear in a room. We gave them an Exceptional Value Award for their transparency and musical accuracy, and we found that they’re very easy to match to a subwoofer even though the bass is nicely extended without one.

Back in 2006 we gave the $1700 ACI Sapphire XL loudspeakers one of our Exceptional Value Awards, and we were curious to see if the $800 Emeralds would do the family proud. This small stand-mounted two-way excelled in smaller rooms and found its calling as a nearfield monitor or part of a desktop system. When supplied with quality amplification, the Emeralds defied expectations.

A Wisconsin native, Jeff built his first amplifier from a schematic in the RCA tube manual at age 14. His hi-fi sales career came to an abrupt end when he told a customer to take his big check up the street to the local Levinson dealer for much better equipment. 15 years as a commercial photographer led to writing about the rapidly expanding world of digital imaging at the turn of the century, writing for Macworld, CNet, Studio Photography and many others. He has also been a consultant to Adobe, Roland DGA and Olympus Cameras. He still takes a very active role in the images produced for TONEAudio, contributing a major portion of the magazine’s visuals.

These days, the Pacific Northwest is home, where you can find him in the local record stores, or under the hood of a BMW, working on an article for his latest venture, MYBMWHabit.com.

Lindsey Buckingham is one of those rare musical geniuses that defy categorization. Much like Prince or Todd Rundgren, Buckingham is a man with a multitude of talents that is very comfortable on either side of the mixing board and has been responsible for a large part of the Fleetwood Mac sound for the last 30 years. Not to mention he’s a hell of a guitar player.

He opened his set in Portland with a few cuts from his new CD, Gift of Screws, which will be released September 16, and moved seamlessly into “Go Your Own Way”. He bounced in and out of his past solo efforts along with many of his favorites from the Fleetwood Mac days all evening, sprinkling in the new material along the way. Read More »