Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i Stereophile

For some years now, I’ve tried to free myself from playing physical media and get all my music organized on a server. It’s not that I don’t enjoy handling and playing discs, but it’s almost impossible to keep track of them. When my collection was only a thousand or two LPs, I felt I could remember each one individually. But now I have several times that many silver discs, and I know I can’t. The fundamental issues are those of filing the music and then finding the music. It’s easy to file a compilation disc like Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter on a shelf under “Collections,” and just as easy to find it there. But can I remember every performer on that neat collection when I…

I measured the Masters Series M32 DirectDigital using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). Usually, before I test an amplifier, I precondition it with both channels driving a 1kHz tone at one-third power into 8 ohms for an hour. This thermally stresses an amplifier with a conventional class-AB output stage, but as the NAD is a class-D design, this wasn’t appropriate. Even so, before doing any testing I ran it for an hour at a moderate power level, to ensure that it was fully warmed up. Because class-D amplifiers emit relatively high levels of ultrasonic noise that would drive my analyzer’s input into slew-rate limiting, all measurements were taken with Audio Precision’s auxiliary AUX-0025 passive low-pass filter, which eliminates noise above 200kHz. Looking…

I measured the HoloAudio Spring DAC “Kitsuné Tuned Edition” Level 3 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4), using both the Audio Precision’s optical and electrical digital outputs and USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro running on battery power with Pure Music 3.0 playing DSD, WAV, and AIFF test-tone files. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the Holo Spring as “xCORE USB Audio 2.0” from “XMOS,” its serial number as “0 (none),” and confirmed that its USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that, via USB, the Spring accepted 24-bit integer data. Its optical, coaxial, and AES/EBU inputs accepted datastreams with sample rates up to 192kHz, and its USB input accepted streams sampled up to 768kHz!…

LG’s implementation of its Hi-Fi Quad DAC is a work of genius. “Phones are the gateway device,” proclaimed Marc Finer, executive producer of the Hi-Res Pavilion, at the start of the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show. When he pointed to LG Electronics’ V30 Hi-Res+MQA smartphone, which includes streaming apps for Qobuz, Tidal, and YouTube, I sensed the truth in his words. The latest stats from survey company MusicWatch confirm that at least 87% of smartphone owners use a music-streaming service, including the largest, YouTube. Twenty percent of owners said that they stream music/music-related content daily, and 39% stream five or more days per week. In fact, 92% of 18–34-year-olds stream music at least one day a week (compared to 52% of those 55 or older), and 96% of 18–34-year-olds listen to…

As the old joke does not go, How do you get to the Papal Chapel? Audition, audition, audition. There you are, gifted and, for the early 1600s, relatively famous. You practically invented opera. You’ve worked for years at what seems a cushy job as the court composer to the Dukes of Gonzaga in Mantua, but you’re underpaid, and feeling as if you need and deserve more. And so you self-publish, under the title Vespers 1610, a 90-minute collection—psalm settings, a motet, a hymn, a Magnificat—that highlights all of your compositional gifts. There are concertos, pieces for solo singers, choruses as intimate as one or two parts and as grand as ten, cornets, violins, unspecified instruments, echo effects designed to impress in a cathedral setting, and pieces that alternate between piety…

Judee Sill Intervention IR-016 (2 45rpm LPs). 1971/2017. John Beck, Jim Pons, Graham Nash, prods.; Henry Lewy, prod., eng.; Larry Cox, eng.; Kevin Gray, remastering. AAA. TT: 33:31 PERFORMANCE SONICS Heart Food Intervention IR-017 (2 45rpm LPs). 1973/2017. Judee Sill, prod.; Henry Lewy, prod., eng.; Kevin Gray, remastering. AAA. TT: 36:23 PERFORMANCE SONICS As is often the case with artists who have passed on, legacy begets legend. And while 1970s songstress Judee Sill’s impact during her short life was minimal—before her death, at 35, of a drug overdose, she was probably better known for being the first signing to David Geffen’s Asylum Records, and for having Graham Nash produce her single “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” than for any measurable commercial inroads—she would go on to inspire subsequent generations of singer-songwriters.…

After the Fall Keith Jarrett, piano; Gary Peacock, double bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums ECM 2590/91 (2 CDs). 2018. Keith Jarrett, prod.; Alain Leduc, eng. DDD. TT: 105:48 PERFORMANCE SONICS This New Jersey performance from mid-November 1998 was Keith Jarrett’s first since the four solo-piano concerts of A Multitude of Angels, in October 1996. He lost the intervening two years to chronic fatigue syndrome. You’d never know it. In After the Fall, his Standards Trio sounds as if it spent those 25 months gigging every other night for the sheer joy of playing together. It is dense with layers of consummate musicianship I expect to be peeling back for years. It also proves that Jack DeJohnette is one of the most subtle, tasteful drummers jazz has known, with a style that…

In an article published in the March 2018 Stereophile,1 I wrote that critics have been attacking MQA, the audio codec developed by J. Robert Stuart and Peter Craven, by accusing it of being lossy. The critics are right: MQA is, in fact, a lossy codec—that is, not all of the data in the original recording are recovered when played back via MQA—though in a clever and innocuous way. For MQA’s critics, though, that’s not the point: They use lossy mainly for its negative emotional associations: When audiophiles hear lossy, they think MP3. Lately, another word—actually, an initialism—is being used in much the same way: DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management. Like lossy codecs, DRM has a long, checkered history in and around audio. The “Red Book” set of specifications,…

The signal path is identical for the digital and analog inputs. When I asked NAD for a sample of their Masters Series M50.2 digital music player, which I reviewed in the December 2017 issue,1 they also sent me a Masters Series M32 DirectDigital integrated amplifier, which had also been introduced at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show. Costing $3999, the M32 offers a continuous power output of >150W into 8 or 4 ohms. The M32 is the same size as the M50.2, and its smart-looking combination of matte black and gray-anodized aluminum panels make it look identical to the player, except for the black volume-control knob to the right of the front panel’s four-color touchscreen, and the 1⁄4" headphone jack at bottom left. It even has the same eight ventilation grilles…

The HoloAudio sounded even more tactile and glass-is-gone transparent. While covering CanMania at the 2017 Capital Audiofest, I was sitting at the table of HeadAmp Audio Electronics, listening first to John McEuen singing Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy,” from McEuen’s Made in Brooklyn (24-bit/192kHz AIFF, Chesky JD388/HDtracks), then to Macy Gray’s Stripped (24/96 AIFF, Chesky JD389/HDtracks). I was listening through HeadAmp’s extraordinary GS-X Mk.2 headphone amplifier ($2999–$3199), but midway through Gray’s “I Try,” I stopped, pulled the Audeze LCD-4 headphones off my head, and asked HeadAmp’s head of sales and marketing, Peter James, what DAC he was using. “Do you know the HoloAudio Spring DAC?” I told him I didn’t, but obviously should. “It’s a ladder DAC, and a lot of my customers use either it or the Schiit Yggdrasil.” I…

I measured the Luxman L-509X using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). Before I test an amplifier, I precondition it with both channels driving a 1kHz tone at one-third power into 8 ohms for an hour. At the end of that time, the Luxman’s top panel was warm, at 95°F (35°C), and the small metal grilles above the heatsinks were hotter, at 107.7°F (42.1°C). Looking first at the line inputs: The maximum voltage gain at 1kHz from the speaker terminals into 8 ohms, with the volume control set to the maximum, measured 43.4dB for both balanced and unbalanced signals. The meters on the amplifier’s front panel appear to be calibrated so that “–20dB” corresponds to just over 1W into 8 ohms. With the…

Music from The Eton Choirbook, Vol.5 Music by John Browne, Robert Fayrfax, Robert Hacomplaynt, Hugo Kellyk, Walter Lambe Stephen Darlington, The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford Avie 2376 (CD). 2017. Jeremy Summerly, prod.; Simon Fox-Gail, eng. DDD. TT: 79:26 PERFORMANCE SONICS The Eton Choirbook is the only remaining evidence of early Tudor polyphonic liturgical music; the Reformation under Henry VIII demanded the destruction of all Latin (ie, Roman Catholic) music, but the Choirbook was guarded and spared. In whole or in part, 64 compositions remain. These are five large-scale pieces by five composers mostly unfamiliar or unknown. What you hear here will make you wish there were more. These early Brits used tune-imitation less than changes in texture. Kellyk’s slowly unfurling “Gaude flore virginali” alternates low voices with high,…

From A Room: Volume 2 Mercury Nashville B0027 408-01 (LP/CD). 2017. Chris Stapleton, Dave Cobb, prods.; Vance Powell, eng. ADA/ADD? TT: 32:22 PERFORMANCE SONICS These days, Chris Stapleton is the biggest thing in country music. Recently, all three of his albums nestled comfortably in the Top 5 of Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, with the latest, From A Room: Volume 2, going straight to the top. But Stapleton is a man out of time. A neotraditionalist in an era of heavily produced country pop, Stapleton sings and philosophizes for grown-ups, not kids with barely a fleeting vision of Billy Joe Shaver and David Allan Coe. You had to know something was up when Stapleton’s first album, Traveller, which felt more like 1985 than 2015, held its own on the charts…

The Lead Belly Project Adam Nussbaum, drums; Ohad Talmor, tenor saxophone; Steve Cardenas, Nate Radley, guitars Sunnyside SSC-1500 (CD). 2018. Adam Nussbaum, prod.; Ohad Talmor, eng. DDD. TT: 43:58 PERFORMANCE SONICS A jazz program of Lead Belly songs is a natural album concept, yet these days such records rarely get made. Most current jazz musicians fancy themselves composers, and a disproportionate number of jazz releases contain all (or mostly all) originals. The result: a vast, rich canon, 100 years of preexisting jazz, folk, and popular repertoire, largely lies fallow. This situation would never occur in classical music. Enter Adam Nussbaum. His parents owned 10" Folkways LPs by Lead Belly that fascinated him as a young child. To return to this music, to close a circle, Nussbaum assembled a quartet of…

In an oft-viewed clip on YouTube, recorded at the 2009 Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, three world-class guitarists pause during a music workshop to talk about their instruments: Danny Knicely describes his 1939 Martin D-18, Chris Eldridge talks briefly about his own 1937 Martin D-28, and Josh Williams notes that his guitar was made in 2002, by the Kentucky-based luthier Neil Kendrick. Then, with fine comic timing, Knicely remarks, “One of these days, me and Chris will be able to afford a new guitar, too!” The joke, of course, is that the vintage Martins cost considerably more than the Kendrick—and more than almost any other comparable guitar made today, including most new Martins. That’s because the older instruments not only sound appreciably better than today’s, they endure in sounding better than…

SATURDAY NIGHT IN HIPSTER BROOKLYN … YET there could have been actual sawdust on the floor. Inside National Sawdust, a youngish crowd, many clearly ready to party, were shuffling, some were full-blown jitterbugging, while onstage the Lost Bayou Ramblers, a progressive young Cajun band who’d at first seemed a bit awed by their futuristic surroundings, were slugging beers, sawing a fiddle, squeezing an accordion, and generally finding their groove. On another visit to the Sawdust, the inestimable Nels Cline, who uses more guitar effects than he’s had birthdays, was teamed with Cibo Matto keyboardist Yuka Honda in a duo they call Cup. This was avant-garde, wildly experimental jamming, with Cline occasionally bellowing into a microphone. As a friend later remarked, it was music that really didn’t need an audience. During…

My gaze was instantly drawn to those black-framed VU meters. We’re well past the day when the sound of top-tier tube amplifiers can be described as “syrupy” or “too warm” or producing “soft bass.” Equally true, solid-state designs have reached a level of maturity at which “sweetness,” “fluidity,” and “flow” are similarly applicable descriptors, thus smashing the cliché of “cold transistor sound.” One high-end audio manufacturer, resourceful in both tube and solid-state designs, has weathered selloffs, acquisitions, and fickle audiophile demands to create beautiful, enduring audio art under a name synonymous with Japanese high-end audio supremacy: Luxman. Founded in 1925 by Tetsuo Hayakawa as part of an Osaka picture-frame business, the Lux Corporation was the first to import to Japan radio receivers from abroad. Playing those receivers in the store…

The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol.6 Miles Davis, trumpet; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Wynton Kelly, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobb, drums Columbia/Legacy 88985448392 (4 CDs). 2018. Steve Berkowitz, Michael Cuscuna, Richard Seidel, prods.; Mark Wilder, mastering. ADD? TT: 3:41:13 PERFORMANCE SONICS Vol.6 of the Miles Davis Bootleg Series is a mindblower. It contains three concerts from the very last tour of a monumental ensemble: the Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane. This material, never before available in an authorized professional production, even includes a rare interview with Coltrane. The year is 1960. The cities are Paris, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. The sources are archived tapes of radio broadcasts. The tunes are standards Miles was famous for (“’Round Midnight,” “All of You”), plus original modal forms (“All Blues,” “So What”)…

Way Out West Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Ray Brown, bass; Shelly Manne, drums Contemporary/Craft CR00021 (2 LPs). 1957/2017. Lester Koenig, orig. prod.; Roy DuNann, orig. eng.; Nick Phillips, reissue prod.; Joe Tarantino, reissue mastering; lacquers cut by George Horn, Anne-Marie Seunram. AAA. TT: TK PERFORMANCE SONICS Just hearing the bald facts gives you the sense that this was a recording session for the ages, and one destined to produce a classic. A young jazz luminary from New York City, on his first trip to California, swept up in thinking about the cowboy movies he’d loved as a kid, jumps at a single whirlwind recording session that begins at 3am and features only bass and drums. He impulsively decides to record two hammy, un–jazz-like, cowboy-themed tunes, Johnny Mercer’s “I’m an Old…

Contra la Indecisión Bobo Stenson, piano; Anders Jormin, bass; Jon Fält, drums ECM 2582 (CD). 2018. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Stefano Amerio, eng. DDD. TT: 64:41 PERFORMANCE SONICS Contra la Indecisión is Bobo Stenson’s first recording for ECM in six years, and only his eighth since 1971. Stenson’s small body of work for the label constitutes one of the permanent piano-trio discographies in modern jazz. The new album is not a departure for Stenson, but a refinement and a deepening. The opening title track, by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, establishes the enveloping atmosphere. Stenson traces its yearning melody with his clear, sensitive touch. Then he immediately flows away from it, because for him, beautiful found melodies always provoke piercing, personal lyricism. He does not write many songs, but all his improvisations…