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The Zu Essence is a big speaker, with a really big sound, fully capable of rocking out like few high-end speakers anywhere near its $3,600 price can. The Essence's wham-bam dynamics are explosive, so please trust me on this, you'll never get that sort of impact from a bookshelf or smaller speaker. My complete Essence review appeared in Home Entertainment magazine, but let me share with you the gist.

Speaker design over the last decade has mostly been devoted to producing greater accuracy, higher resolution, lower distortion, and wider frequency response, but those qualities don't necessarily produce a sound that will stir your soul. Accuracy is one thing, but there's an artistry to speaker design no computer will ever match. Zu designers are definitely more interested in musicality than accuracy, and it totally works.

The Essence is 49 inches high and 12 inches wide and deep. It has a 10.3-inch full-range driver and a 2.5-inch foil-ribbon tweeter. The advanced technology tweeter is sourced from Taiwan, and then entirely rebuilt and modified in Ogden, Utah. All of the 10.3-inch paper-cone driver's parts are made in the U.S., and assembled in the Zu factory. The completed tweeters and woofers are extensively tested and sorted into matched, close-tolerance pairs that are used in production speakers.

Zu offers a range of standard painted and wood veneer finishes, and a slew of extra-cost custom paint finishes. Zu's paint shop does outstanding work, with overall build quality the equal of speakers that sell for many times the Essence's $3,600 price. In the context of today's high-end speaker market the Essence is a steal!

This speaker can rock out better than any speaker near its price, and since the Essence is unusually efficient, it clicked with very low-power amps, like the $378 Miniwatt N3 (3.5 watts per channel amplifier). Actually, the speaker sounded best with a First Watt J2 (25 watt stereo amp), but I've also used the Essence with my 400 watt per channel Parasound JC 1 power amps, no problem. In fact, the Essence delivered great sound with every amp I've tried. … Read more

Sound & Vision magazine's Michael Trei recently tested three turntables: the Rega Research P1 ($395), Music Hall mmf 2.2 ($449), and Technics SL-1200MK2 ($699). And guess what: the most expensive turntable wasn't the best-sounding one!

Mike's an old friend and a major turntable guru in his own right. His knowledge of all things analog runs deep, and he regularly sets up finicky high-end turntables for the rich and famous, including the president of a major record company, here in NYC. Mike set up the VPI Classic turntable I bought last year.

The three turntables covered in his report, the Rega, Music Hall, and Technics are all excellent, but I was more interested in the belt vs. direct-drive aspect of the reviews. The Technics is a long standing DJ favorite, for its powerful, direct-drive motor, which is a big plus when you're back cueing and scratching records. Direct-drive 'tables never wowed the high-end crowd, they favor belt-drive turntables. The appeal is mostly based on the fact that the belt "decouples" the motor from the platter. So whatever noise and vibration the motor makes as it spins aren't directly transmitted to the platter, and therefore to the record. No wonder the vast majority of turntables sold to audiophiles are belt-drive designs.

Mike may be a hard-core audiophile, but he's not closed-minded about direct-drive turntables, and in fact owns a Technics direct-drive turntable (and many belt-drives as well).… Read more

I love magazines. I subscribe to around a dozen of them and even started one of my own many years ago. (PalmPilot users may remember it: Tap, which later became Handheld Computing.)

Unfortunately, most of the magazine content I've seen on my iPhone has been mediocre at best. Usually it's poorly formatted, incomplete, out of date, and/or not of particular interest.

So imagine my delight upon discovering TapTilt, a monthly magazine about the iPhone you read on your iPhone. It's smartly designed, stocked with original content, and decidedly interesting reading for the everyday iPhone user.

The May, 2010, debut issue kicks off with three features, one each on baseball apps, gardening apps, and iPhone-created art. They're formatted not only to fit the screen, but also to resemble traditional magazine spreads. Thus you see unique headline fonts, topic-specific artwork and color schemes, screenshots, and overall attention to design detail.

Unlike a typical print rag, however, TapTilt adds multimedia to the mix: links, videos, Facebook/Twitter integration, and even some interactive goodies. The baseball-app feature, for example, includes extras like a baseball calendar and a nationwide map of stadiums.

After the features, TapTilt serves up weekly game and music reviews--both in video format. I'm not sure why the editors insist on doling these out one week at a time; it's a bit frustrating to know that there's a review of the game Drift Sumi available, but I have to wait until the fourth week of May to get it.

At least what's there is good. The video review of All-in-1 Gamebox, for instance, is one of the most polished and entertaining app reviews I've ever seen. The Diner Dash review seemed a bit amateurish by comparison, but I still found it preferable to reading a static all-text review.

TapTilt also serves up a variety of expected-to-be-recurring columns, including iPhoneography (the art of taking photos on your iPhone), Travel, Tips and Tricks, Wallpaper of the Week, and iMazing (stories of "amazing uses and strange apps"). It's all good stuff.… Read more

I've reviewed or listened to a lot of speakers over the years. Hundreds and hundreds of them, and I instantly forget most of them, but I guarantee that if someone asks me about the Tannoy Prestige Kensington SE speaker in 10 years, I won't have a problem remembering what it sounded like.

Tannoy, founded in 1926, currently manufactures a vast range of speakers for audiophiles and recording studios. The company started out building sound reinforcement systems and is still a major player in that business: the Hong Kong Convention Center, Sydney Opera House, London Palladium, Coca Cola Headquarters in Atlanta and the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas all use Tannoy speakers. Tannoy is based in North Lanarkshire, Scotland.

The Kensington SE has a 10-inch, dual-concentric driver and a mahogany-veneered, high-density birch wood cabinet. The Prestige line dates back to 1982 when Tannoy introduced the mighty Westminster speaker, which was upgraded and renamed Westminster Royal in 1987. It's still in production and goes for $35,000 a pair. The Kensington SE ($13,120 a pair) is one of the newer Prestige models, just 7 years old, and the entire line was upgraded to SE status with newly designed crossovers and internal wiring in 2007. Tannoy also sells speakers for under $1,000 a pair.

The speaker's front panel hosts a conspicuous set of tone controls for the tweeter labeled "Treble Energy" and "Treble Roll Off." That sort of tweakability is rare in high-end speakers, but it lets you dial in exactly the right treble balance to accommodate your room's acoustics. … Read more

I've been writing quite a bit about the iPad, and that's partially because I have one and love it. But now, to take on my iPad, German company Neofonie has supposedly come up with a tablet of its own called the "WePad." Yes, we get the pun, too.

But it's not just the WePad hardware that sounds impressive (it's said to run a 1.66GHz Intel Atom processor, and have a 720p wide-screen display and a Webcam, among other things). It's also the thought that seemed to have gone into the ecosystem behind the device. It's said to run Android and Linux and have full access to the Android Marketplace, as well as a custom WePad app store.

Thing is, while the WePad is getting tons of (virtual) ink, not everyone's convinced it's real. At least one German Web site, the site for news channel N-TV, is questioning the authenticity of the device itself. How, it asks, can a small company in Germany so quickly put out a full-featured tablet when companies like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Nokia don't have anything comparable to show off yet? Then again, a small company just came out with the CrunchPad JooJoo, so who's to say?

N-TV also points out that the prototype apparently shown off this week in Berlin didn't actually work--all it did was run a video of what the device can supposedly do.

But back to what the WePad does, if in fact it's the real deal.… Read more

Some days, even The Cheapskate comes up empty. I searched high and low, checked in with all my DealSpies (trademark), and even went rummaging in the old-but-still-good deals bin. Nuthin'.

Sure, game fans may want to check out Direct2Drive's spring sale, which includes a few goodies (like Fallout 3 for $14.95). But ultimately, this day is looking mighty "meh," deal-wise.

On the other hand, who's up for some freebies?! One to boost your energy, one to boost your health, and one to rot your brain. Here's the rundown:

Okay, I give up. I spent all morning digging and searching for a killer deal--then a decent deal-- and finally just a deal that wouldn't get me laughed out of the blogosphere. Know what? Got nothing.

I mean, sure, there's the Epson Stylus 1400 wide-format printer for $149.99, which is a good price--but how many people really need a wide-format printer? (Actually, they're great for cranking out giant photos, custom art, etc.)

And, yeah, I snagged a three-year subscription to Men's Health for $17.97 (with coupon code 3201). But that's hardly headline-worthy.

So … Read more

All of my friends back east are jumping for joy, as it appears to be finally warming up a little and melting the pounds of snow they've been hit with for the past month. And since it seems that the snow will soon be drained into our great country's sewer systems, I thought we'd send the snow off with this video blog post about the most badass snowcar I've ever seen. Check it out.

Rally team driver and Chief Brand Officer of DC Shoes, Ken Block, apparently took a Subaru Impreza WRX STI and transformed it … Read more