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Sonus Faber Venere 3.0 Home Theater Speaker System

Jim Clements

This Sonus faber home theater speaker system is based on the new Venere 3.0 floor standing speakers, the flagship of the Venere line. The Veneres are designed in Italy and include drivers designed from the ground up specifically for this speaker line. The drivers are made exclusively for Sonus faber by some of the best suppliers on the planet. The Veneres even have the famous Sonus faber lyre-shaped cabinets.

Floor Standing Speakers

MartinLogan Stage X Electrostatic Hybrid Center Channel Speaker

John E. Johnson Jr. and Cynthia B. Johnson

MartinLogan is most famous for their electrostatic speakers (ESLs). I remember many years ago hearing their full-range model and was astonished at the transparency. Since that time, they have produced ESLs of varying sizes, and in "hybrid" form, meaning that a cone woofer takes care of the low frequencies, which smaller ELS panels cannot reproduce. When home theater became a prominent market, they released the Stage, which used a dome tweeter, ESL panel for the midrange, and cone woofers. The newest iteration of the Stage line is the Stage X, which has a thin film tweeter (called "Folded Motion" by MartinLogan). This type of tweeter is part of the flat panel family of speakers, which includes ESLs, Ribbons, and Planar Magnetic speakers. So, with the Stage X, the high frequencies and midrange are now handled by flat panel technology.

Center Channel Speakers

Integrating High-End Two-Channel Audio into Home Theater without Compromise

John E. Johnson, Jr.

For those of us who enjoy two-channel (stereo) audio using a high-end system, but also like our home theater with surround sound, how to integrate the two setups without compromising the stereo high-end system has been a conundrum. In this article, I will show you how to have both systems interconnected, but not compromise the sound when you want to listen to your stereo CDs, or SACD in stereo.

Editor's DeskEditorial

Accell UltraCat HD HDMI Extender

Sumit Chawla, Ph.D.

During CEDIA 2011, one technology that caught my attention was HDBaseT. It provided a solution to the all too familiar cable clutter problem. Below is a picture that I took at their booth which shows a set of cables whose signals could all be transmitted over a single Cat5e/6 cable at distances up to 100m.

Wireless