Focal, the French speaker and speaker component manufacturer formerly doing business as Focal-JMLabs, has always made a point of getting great sound at shows. While I didn't run into Focal at Primedia's Home Entertainment 2006 show in Los Angeles this June, I did hear some music in the MBL room that morphed into another sale for Amazon. As I work on the final edit of this review I'm listening to the just-delivered Jeff Buckley rendition of "Hallelujah" from his 1994 album Grace (CD, Columbia, CK 57528). The memory of what this song sounded like on the $47,000/pair MBL 101E speakers is still fresh. At just 1/10th the MBL's price, Focal's Profile 918 speakers get me very, very close to the fire-branded goose bumps I felt in LA last month.

I remember someone telling me years ago that, in order to prevent 'P's sounding like spit on the radio, D.J.'s were coached to say 'B' instead. I remember WBLR, I mean WPLR, in New Haven, Connecticut being one such station. Sometimes you'd catch them, clear as day, with a 'B' rolling off their tongues, but for the most part they got away with it, no one the wiser.

We can describe all the colors in the universe, well, at least the colors of Fox, Disney, MGM, Warner Brothers and Universal, with but three primary colors: red, green and blue. That's how our projectors do it. Blind people have been asked to describe the colors they've never seen, and I think they need a lot of words to accomplish what three tint filters and a gain control can do. I hope they're not reading this. That last could be deemed offensive.

The Plasma Display Coalition (PDC), a consortium of well known plasma manufacturers, is high on life. According to Coalition’s President Jim Palumbo, 2006 will see over three million plasma sets sold to consumers. So why are coalition members Hitachi Home Electronics, LG Electronics USA, Panasonic Corporation of America, Pioneer Electronics (USA) and Samsung Electronics USA going on the defensive? That’s easy, just ask any of the ill-trained sales employees at the big consumer electronic chains to tell you the difference between plasma and LCD panels, and they’ll blurt out urban legend like it’s going on sale.