Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i Stereophile

THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS THIS ISSUE: For reviewers, the whole is greater than the sum of a product’s individual parts. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.—WILLIAM BRUCE CAMERON, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking (1963) I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings—WALT WHITMAN, “That Music Always Round Me,” from Leaves of Grass These two statements, to me, express the core perspective shared by Stereophile’s contributors. When I encountered both of them within a span of 30 days, they spoke so strongly that I felt impelled to hook up the biggest, baddest loudspeakers I could find and broadcast them to the world, without distortion. Failing in that…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophilesocieties. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@XLinkAudio.com. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event CALIFORNIA ❚ Sunday, January 22, 1–4pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting, presented by San Diego’s Alma Music and Audio in the beautiful Penthouse Ballroom of the Holiday Inn Buena Park (7000 Beach Boulevard). The acoustics are excellent, and there will be seating for all. Our host, Fabio Storelli of Alma Music and Audio, will demonstrate examples of top-of-theline equipment, including: speakers…

The Moor’s Revenge On a bright, warm day in September, at the memorial gathering for our colleague Wes Phillips, I overheard John Atkinson, in pre-ceremony conversation, discussing men’s fashions: “What’s popular these days,” he said, with a degree of puzzlement that stopped short of disapproval, “is very long hair on just the top, with nothing on the sides and back.” Then he added, this time with disdain, “What I don’t understand is this trend where men wear dress shoes without socks—which I have actually seen!” The fact that we were in Park Slope, Brooklyn—the very jaw of the hipster possum—may have triggered his observations, which I overheard while chatting with Stereophile alum Laura LoVecchio. I remember reflexively looking down at my own ankles, to make sure I was wearing socks.…

As with the Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 90, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, it made more sense for me to measure MartinLogan’s Masterpiece Renaissance ESL 15A at the reviewer’s home than having them shipped to my Brooklyn lab. (I also wanted to take a listen to the speakers.) Also as with the BeoLab 90, I used a test setup different from my usual MLSSA software/hardware system, which is not readily transportable. (As MLSSA needs to be installed in a 1997-vintage desktop computer running MS-DOS, it isn’t something I can take on a plane as carry-on baggage.) So when I visited Jon Iverson in central California immediately after last October’s Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I had with me my MacBook Pro running SMUGSoftware’s Fuzzmeasure 3 app, along with calibrated DPA 4006…

Imeasured the Luxman D-06u with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4). As well as playing test CDs and the “provisional” test SACD produced by Sony, I examined the behavior of the digital inputs with either S/PDIF signals fed from the SYS2722, or WAV and AIFF test-tone files played with Pure Music 3.0 by my MacBook Pro running on battery power and fed via USB. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the processor as the “Super Audio CD Player D-06u” from “Luxman,” and confirmed that the D-06u’s USB input operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The coaxial S/PDIF input accepted data sampled at up to 192kHz, the TosLink input up to 96kHz. Apple’s AudioMIDI app indicated that the Luxman operated at all PCM…

THIS ISSUE: John Atkinson measures the Auditorium 23 Hommage Cinema horns and Audeze’s The King headphone amp, while Jason Victor Serinus offers his impressions of the dCS Rossini DAC. AUDITORIUM 23 HOMMAGE CINEMA LOUDSPEAKER It’s no secret that deputy editor Art Dudley is an anachrophile.1 After expounding on the virtues of vintage audio gear in his October 2016 “Listening” column,2 he spent no fewer than seven pages of our November issue3 raving about the sound quality of Auditorium 23’s expensive Hommage Cinema loudspeaker, from Germany.4 He was blown away by what he described as “the speakers’ exceptional ease—that too-rare quality in which music is neither shot nor squeezed, toothpaste-like, at the listener, nor left hanging stagnant, half a world away. With record after record, music simply happened; although there’s no…

Keith Jarrett’s long-form improvisational concerts and his many other musical activities took their toll, as did chronic fatigue syndrome—and at 71, as he admits, Jarrett no longer has a young man’s stamina. For nearly two decades now, his solo-piano concerts have comprised short improvisations, few longer than ten minutes. Most of his solo concert recordings in that format—Radiance, Tokyo Solo, Carnegie Hall, Testament, Rio, Creation—have included passages of rare brilliance, beauty, or challenge, often all three at once. But none offers what is so uniquely attractive about his long-form sets, whose sheer duration, it now seems, was the only thing that made possible their encyclopedic depth and breadth. In the best of the longform concerts—Bremen Lausanne, Köln, and most of all Bregenz München and the monumental Sun Bear—one hears the…

BEACH SLANG A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings Polyvinyl PRC-319 (LP). 2016. James Alex, prod.; Dave Downham, prod., eng. ADA? TT: 30:13 Clocking in at a perfectly tidy halfhour, the just-as-perfectly titled A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings oozes with a primal potential that has already drawn comparisons with the Replacements and The Clash. There’s anthemism galore in these grooves—brilliant, royalblue vinyl grooves at that—via chiming/chugging guitars, huge foursquare beats, and raspy-throated vocal urgency. It all dares your inner adolescent not to start pumping both fists. Steered by singer-guitarist James Alex, the young Philly four-piece powers through such teen fantasyscapes as the feedback-flecked, Paul Westerbergian “Atom Bomb” (“I’m an atom bomb / Come smear your lips on my bruises / Wake me up, wear me out, / let’s get free,…

Rough Trade RTRADLP 780 (2 LPs). 2016. Warpaint, prods.; Jake Bercovici, prod., eng.; Ivan Wayman, eng. ADA? TT: 52:12 Just three tracks into this third album from Los Angeles–based, distaff dreampoppers Warpaint, pop perfection awaits. It’s the danceybouncysexycool “New Song,” sounding for all its life like a pagan marriage between Blondie (when the iconic New Yorkers were starting to embrace disco) and the Bangles (during the L.A. femmes’ MTV reign). The chorus is as irresistible, in its hooky tunefulness and simplicity, as anything those icons ever crafted: “You’re a new song / You’re a new song, baby / You’re a new song to me.” In late 2013, the quartet broke out of the pack with their second album, Warpaint, a masterpiece of atmosphere and grooves that landed on scores of…

AUDIO ART, est. 1976 – Edge-of-theart audio components dedicated to serving music. Aesthetix, AMG, Audience, Avalon, Ayre, Benz, Cardas, Clearaudio, Hegel, Jeff Rowland, Martin Logan, Music Hall, Pro-Ject Series, Rega, Shunyata, SME, Sonus Faber, Spendor, Vandersteen. (804) 358-5300, AudioArtUSA@aol.com, Richmond, VA. LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK – Audience, Audio Desk, Audio Physic, Audioquest, Avalon Acoustics, Berkeley Audio Design, Bryston, Cardas, Conrad-Johnson, Dali, Esoteric, Hegel, Jeff Rowland, Lyra, Martin-Logan, Oppo, Oracle Audio, Ortofon, Parasound, Plinius, Purist Audio Design, Siltech, SME, Stax, Symposium Acoustics, Tannoy Prestige, Thorens, Totem, VPI, Wireworld and many more. Large selection of fine preowned gear, quality trades welcome, analog guru on board. New York Sound & Vision (631) 321-8969 or visit www.newyorksoundandvision.com…

Turning off the kids Editor: I would like to point out one item that I think might be holding some younger folks from the hobby: Some items in the “hard core” audiophile community can be perilously close to snake oil. Today’s kids are savvy. They aren’t gonna go for “directional Ethernet cables.” There can be 10,000 great audiophile products on the market, but if a kid reads one compelling article debunking, say, the likes of an “audiophile SDcard,” they will sour on the whole concept of high-end audio. No hobby is immune to these kind of things, but the audiophile marketplace seems to have elevated it to an art form. —Fletcher Chambers fletcher.c.chambers@comcast.net Turning on future generations Editor: I am a lapsed Stereophile reader, first exposed to your publication in…

THIS ISSUE: Reflections on Bang & Olufsen’s Beolab 90 speaker and a high-performance music-oriented PC. A ROUNDED MAN CANNOT BE EXPECTED TO FIT INTO A SQUARE HOLE Bang & Olufsen’s revolutionary BeoLab 90 loudspeaker, which I examine in greater depth elsewhere in this issue, has had some profound effects on me, not least of which is that the review pair prevented me from listening in multichannel for nearly two months. Additionally, I and a few friends found that the two BeoLab 90s delivered an absolutely stunning and convincing soundstage. So when the time came to relinquish them, I was anxious. Would my reference 5.1-channel surround system now disappoint when I played two-channel recordings? Would I still find multichannel to be a substantial advance over stereo, or no improvement at all?…

LOUDSPEAKER Bang & Olufsen’s BeoLab 90 is not a loudspeaker to take on lightly. Though its size—49.33" high by 28.9" wide by 29.4" deep—and weight (302 lbs each) meant a major disruption of my listening room, which is also our living room, my wife assented. Its price of $84,990/pair puts it far beyond anything I might consider buying—and the complexity of the BeoLab 90, which has its own dedicated amplifiers and DACs, makes it impossible for a reviewer— or consumer—to directly compare it with any other loudspeaker. So be it. Ever since I returned from visiting Bang & Olufsen’s factory1 in Struer, Denmark, and listening to a final prototype of the BeoLab 90, I’ve wanted to hear it again—this time in my own home. Sure, I heard the production BeoLab…

Iused DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Trenner & Friedl Sun’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield responses. My estimate of the Sun’s voltage sensitivity was 82dB/2.83V/m, which confirms the specified figure but is well below average. This is hardly surprising considering that the woofer cone has an effective diameter of just 3.5”.1 The Sun’s specified impedance is 4 ohms; the graph of its impedance magnitude and electrical phase angle against frequency (fig.1) reveals that while the impedance drops slightly below 4 ohms between 200 and 400Hz, reaching a minimum value of 3.7 ohms at 270Hz, it remains above 6 ohms for the bass and treble regions. Even considering the combination of 5 ohms and a phase…

Sabine Devieilhe, soprano; Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion Erato 0825646075843 (CD). 2016. Daniel Zalay, prod.; Hugues Deschaux, eng. DDD. TT: 72:26 PERFORMANCE SONICS When Mozart visited Mannheim in 1777, he fell in with the music-loving Weber family, which boasted four talented daughters, all sopranos. He disliked Josepha (“lazy, deceitful”), and Sophie was too young, but he fell in love with 17-year-old Aloysia. When she rejected him, he sat down at the piano and composed a ditty to the words “She can kiss my ass.” He soon married the slightly younger Constanze. If you play through the final track on this CD—the gorgeous “Et incarnatus est,” composed for Constanze, from the Mass K.427—and wait 10 seconds, you can hear it—unannounced. It and the other selections here, composed for the three older Weber sisters,…

High Noon: A 50-Year Retrospective Omnivore 101442 (5 CDs). 2016. Various orig. prods., engs; Cheryl Pawelski, Arqive 50 Research, reissue prods.; Norm DeMoura, Harmonium Studio, sound restoration. AAD? TT: 5:09:52 For more than two decades, Peek-ABoo: The Best of NRBQ (1969–1989) was considered the gold standard of anthologies of the New Rhythm and Blues Quintet/Quartet (NRBQ), with plenty of cross-licensing from various labels. But as good and ambitious as that Rhino collection is, High Noon is light-years better. For starters, it covers the Q’s entire span, ranging from a very early, previously unreleased, crude and Animals-esque pre-Q home recording from 1966, to a song recorded live for SiriusXM radio in late 2015. Despite a ton of personnel changes— piano whiz and songwriter Terry Adams remains the only constant—the band’s joyful,…

Stephan Crump, double bass; Ellery Eskelin, tenor saxophone; Adam O’Farrill, trumpet; Tyshawn Sorey, drums Papillon Sounds PS51515 (CD). 2016. Stephan Crump, prod.; Aaron Nevezie, eng. DDD. TT: 59:37 Stephan Crump is best known as Vijay Iyer’s bassist, but he has now made 10 records of his own. Rhombal is a form of eulogy. Crump lost his brother to cancer, and composed this music to embody the spiritual evolution the two of them shared in their last days together. The album never feels exclusively sad. Songs like “Skippaningam” and “Birdwhistle” are animated, quick, and constantly shifting. “How Close Are You” and “Pulling Pillars (Outro for Patty)” are solemn contemplations. Their bare poignance is very moving. In fact, all of this album is constantly shifting. It is a journey over the most…

SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should e-mail the when, where, and who to JAtkinson@enthusiastnetwork.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the March 2017 issue is December 20, 2016. THE INTERNET Paul Messenger Geoff Hill1 has written a book: How to Design and Specify High Quality Loudspeakers: Loudspeaker Design Made Simple! It costs a not-inconsiderable £82.99 ($92.99 US) because each copy is printed to order. It consists of 348 pages in A4 format (11.5" by 8"), with 33 chapters and 13 appendices. I’ve known Geoff Hill for some 40 years—ever since the beginning of the Impulse speaker brand that he cofounded—so I’m not the person to review his book, though I can describe its basic structure and approach. Early on, in…

JANÁCEK Orchestral Works, Vol.3 Glagolitic Mass, Adagio for Orchestra, Zdrávas Maria, Otce náš Sara Jakubiak, soprano; Susan Bickley, mezzo-soprano; Stuart Skelton, tenor; Gábor Bretz, bass; David Stewart, violin; Johannes Wik, harp; Karstein Askeland, Thomas Trotter, organ; Choir of Collegiûm Mûsicûm, Edvard Grieg Chorus, Bergen Cathedral Choir, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus; Edward Gardner Chandos CHSA 5165 (SACD/CD). 2016. Ralph Couzens, eng. DDD. That’s just about the longest headnote I’ve ever submitted, but its length is proportionate to the massive forces involved, and to their achievement. Janácek’s intense and passionate Mass setting demands a matching response from the performers, but also internalization of those emotions. Until this release, no satisfying recording had taken advantage of the ability of multichannel to contain, if barely, the demands of the Glagolitic Mass. Earlier, competent…

LOUDSPEAKER I prefer and have owned electrostatic speakers for most of my audiophile life. Depending on your point of view, this makes me either the most qualified or the least appropriate writer to review MartinLogan’s new electrostatic loudspeaker, the Masterpiece Renaissance ESL 15A. Oh, I’ve flirted with dynamic speakers. I’ve owned and loved—and ultimately, when I was an audio retailer, sold— models from Revel, Thiel, Vandersteen, and many others, while my long-term choice has been electrostats. And while I’ve spent plenty of time with electrostatic speakers from Acoustat and Quad, I’ve ended up owning MartinLogans: Sequels, Quests, ReQuests, and, currently, Prodigys. What attracts me to electrostatic speakers are the clarity, neutrality, and sense of “thereness” I hear from them, along with the natural cohesiveness of the imaging and midrange reproduction…

The BeoLab 90 is so massive that, rather than having it shipped to my home, I traveled to Kal Rubinson’s place to take some measurements. I used SMUGSoftware’s Fuzzmeasure 3 app running on my MacBook Pro, along with an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone and a FireWire-connected Metric Halo ULN-2, which combines a low-noise microphone preamplifier with A/D and D/A converters. (These were set to a sample rate of 96kHz for the measurements and I fed Fuzzmeasure’s analog signal to the Master loudspeaker where it was converted at 192kHz.) First of all, as KR described in his review, the BeoLab 90 system uses digital signal processing (DSP) to correct the room’s acoustic. However, it differs from conventional correction solutions in applying not just individual filters for the Left and Right speakers, but…

Iperformed a full set of measurements on the Woo WA5 using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/measurements-maps-precision) and one of the RCA inputs. The voltage gain into 8 ohms from the speaker terminals was 31dB with the gain switch in the H position, just 3.8dB with it in the L position. From the unbalanced headphone jack set to High Power, the gain into 300 ohms was a very high 44.5dB at the H setting, 17.1dB at L. Switched to Low Power, the respective headphoneoutput gains were 31.1 and 17.1dB. Both the speaker and headphone outputs inverted absolute polarity. TheWA5’s input impedance was usefully high, at 83k ohms at 20Hz and 1kHz, 60k ohms at 20kHz. The output impedance from the headphone jack…

Music for 18 Musicians, Violin Phase, Music for a Large Ensemble, Octet, Tehillim ECM New Series 2540–2542 (3 CDs). 1978, 1980, 1982/2016. Manfred Eicher, Rudolph Werner, prods.; Klaus Hiemann, Martin Wieland, engs. AAD. TT: 2:14:54 In honor of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday, ECM has reissued its three groundbreaking albums of his works as a boxed set. One album comprises his most famous composition, Music for 18 Musicians, in a recording made in 1976 for Deutsche Grammophon but not issued until 1978, when it became ECM’s first non-jazz release. A surprisingly successful seller, it was followed in 1980 by an album containing two similar pieces, Music for a Large Ensemble and Octet, as well as the earlier Violin Phase. The final album, Tehillim, from 1982, marks a departure though not a…

Mutants of the Monster: A Tribute to Black Oak Arkansas Saustex SEX1604 (LP/CD). 2016. Joey Killingsworth, prod.; Dik LeDoux, eng. DDD? TT: 65:50 Black Oak Arkansas was the epitome of rock’n’roll excess, Southern style. These sonically extreme hillbillies beat the tar out of their instruments in service of a chaotic maelstrom of sound, as larger-than-life frontman Jim Dandy Mangrum surfed the chaos induced by three guitarists incapable of getting out of each others’ way. Though the band was a grotesquerie to mainstream rock fans, it achieved mythical resonance throughout the deep South. Mutants of the Monster, a tribute album based on a track from the band’s third album, features an array of musicians purportedly influenced by BOA, all backed by the efforts of Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre. The…

TARA Labs Air Evolution Editor: I want to thank Stereophile and Michael Fremer for reviewing our Air Evolution interconnects. I would also like to take this opportunity to add a little bit more information on our products. One of the main characteristics of TARA Labs audio cables is that, whichever level of product you listen to, be it entry-level or extreme reference-grade cables, you will find that many of the same technologies, designs, and materials go into every cable we manufacture. And, of course, all TARA Labs products are custom hand-crafted in the USA and lifetime guaranteed. So what is the difference between TARA Labs audio cables costing a few hundred dollars and cable models costing thousands of dollars? The answer is, “you get more.” As you go up our…