made in the u.s

Great audio can be expensive, but Ben Carter's ambitious Kickstarter project aims to make a serious dent in the price of quality turntables. A $150 pledge secures an Orbit belt-drive turntable, fitted with an Ortofon phono cartridge. As I write this blog, and just a few days after the Kickstarter project was launched, Carter has already passed the halfway mark to reaching his $60,000 goal!

I spoke with Carter on Thursday; he has a background in marketing and consulting, and Bob Hertig is handling the engineering for the project. Orbits will be manufactured by U-Turn Audio in the … Read more

If Made In USA is a feature, Hewlett-Packard's got Apple beat.

In effect, that's what HP said today. "Lots of noise...about Apple moving Mac production back to the U.S.... [We] wanted to offer HP's story," said an HP representative via e-mail Friday.

Part of that story was provided by way of a blog post.

"HP PCs have been assembled in the U.S. since the beginning," the post begins. "HP workstations and commercial desktop PCs are manufactured in Indianapolis, and HP servers are manufactured in Houston. These manufacturing facilities employ … Read more

It was just a few weeks ago when my buddy Tyll Hertsens was raving about Colin Shaw's Sicphones amplifier Kickstarter project. Hertsens never steers me wrong, so I contacted Shaw, and a few days later I received the amp. Hertsens was right. This design uses a newly available SemiSouth silicon carbide transistor, and the amp sounds amazing. If Shaw makes his Kickstarter goal he'll be able to sell amp kits for as little as $229, and assembled amps for $279! DIY-ers can spring for just $35 and get the Sicphones amplifier PC board, assembly instructions, and parts source … Read more

I have fond memories of the original Aragon 4004 power amplifier from my days when I worked as a high-end audio salesman. That was in the late 1980s and the big 200 watt amp sold for a lot less money than the reigning high-end amps of the period. The distinctive styling, with a "V" cutout in the 4004's chassis, made it stand out from rows of lookalike designs at the store. While the Aragon amps sold for a couple of thousand dollars, they were more affordable than most high-end amps. A few years after the 4004 arrived … Read more

The Fourth of July is coming up next week. It's a good time to take stock of where the country stands in the world of technology manufacturing.

We've been hearing quite a bit lately about how feasible (or not) it is to make tech products right here at home.

Manufacturing plants in Asia pretty much have the cell phone and gadget market cornered, but there are some blips on the U.S.-made tech radar. Google has managed to design and build the Nexus Q streaming media player in America.

Is this a sign of a reboot for technology manufacturing in America?… Read more

One unmistakable theme in Super Bowl ads this year was manufacturing in America. Is it time for Apple to reconsider all of the production it does abroad?

GE's ad, which highlighted Appliance Park in Louisville, KY, tried to show that the U.S. is still perfectly capable of making big-ticket consumer products.

"We're on the forefront of revitalizing manufacturing," a production line worker says. "We're proving that it can be done here and it can be done well," he adds.

The Chrysler ad starring Clint Eastwood echoes the same theme of making things … Read more

Cogentrix Energy has been granted a $90.6 million conditional loan guarantee from the Department of Energy to build a 30-megawatt concentrated photovoltaic solar plant in Alamosa, Colo., the company announced yesterday

The company also said it plans to source a minimum of 80 percent of the solar farm components from within the U.S. That promise is significant given the size and scope of the solar farm, and its technology.

The Alamosa Solar Generating Project will be the largest solar project in the world using high concentrated photovoltaics (HCPVs) with a dual-axis tracking system. That means that each concentrated … Read more

I've owned, listened to, and reviewed a lot of high-end CD players, but none of them sounded as good as PS Audio's PerfectWave Transport and Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) components.

The Transport uses a CD-ROM drive mechanism that "reads" and rereads the data on the CD as many times as necessary until a bit-perfect match is achieved. PS Audio's Web site says the CD's data is placed in a 64MB memory buffer as the music plays, so you're not directly listening to the CD. To prove that claim remove the disc from the Transport and the music will continue playing for approximately 30 seconds!

The Transport can also play high-resolution WAV files off DVDs, with sample rates up to 192-kHz with 24-bit resolution. I had a few of these DVDs on hand for this review, and the PerfectWave components really shined with high-resolution audio. … Read more

Americans love power. We buy 320-horsepower Chevy Tahoes to haul the kids to soccer practice. For home theater, the magic power number for receivers is 100 watts, and it has to be a seven-channel model, even though 80 or 90 percent of home theater buyers are perfectly happy with five-channel sound.

Americans equate power with quality, but I'm here to tell you there's another way. Sure, power is cheap, and a the-more-the-merrier strategy works well enough most of the time. Let's just be clear on what amplifier power provides: it defines the upper limit of how loud … Read more