Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Stereophile

One of the recurring themes of this column has been my search for servers that will support the playback of high-resolution multichannel files with DSP for speaker/room equalization (EQ), as well as the format conversion and downsampling that are often part of those processes. Because most EQ software is PCM-based, format conversion is needed to convert DSD files to PCM. In addition, because most EQ products work within a limited range of sampling rates, PCM files sampled at high rates may have to be downsampled before being subjected to EQ. Those of us who use home-theater preamplifier-processors and audio/video receivers (AVRs) should be familiar with such constraints. Remember the hue and cry that went up when it was revealed that even top-of-the-line processors downsampled everything to 48kHz in order to…

To provide a picture of what the Concept 500s sounded like in my room. I ran a number of in-room measurements on the Q Acoustics Concept 500s using the OmniMic test system from Parts Express. I took all of these at my main listening seat, with the speakers positioned as they were auditioned. Figs. 1 and 2 show the left- and right-channel responses of the Concept 500s, taken at an average of 10 positions around the height of my ears when I’m seated, and with the speakers’ HF jumpers set to “+”. All results shown here were⅙-octave smoothed. The anomalies, particularly in the deep bass, are common to most in-room speaker measurements, though the details significantly vary with the room. The peak at around 150Hz was far less audible than…

Rogue Audio’s RP-7 line preamplifier is built like a farm tractor, and looks unpretentious and timeless. You know I’m a lucky guy. I maintain two separate audio reviewing systems. The core component of my beloved, daily-driver desktop system is a Mytek Brooklyn DAC-preamp-headphone amp. Through this system I play high-resolution files and Internet sources (Tidal, Qobuz, Netflix, and YouTube). One of the Brooklyn’s two line-level inputs delivers NPR news and baseball from my Kenwood KT-990D FM/AM tuner. I mostly use this system with headphones, but currently, the Brooklyn’s line-out feeds a pair of Bel Canto Design’s compact e.One REF600M monoblocks driving the shelf-mounted Dynaudio Excite X14 speakers I use to play movies and videos. My bulkier, more elaborate floor system employs a modified Home Depot rack as a totem and…

Setup and use were virtually hassle-free. This is the kind of product I love. For years, I’ve attended audio shows at which the Canadian company EMM Labs, either on its own or in conjunction with Kimber Kable and IsoMike, has displayed some of the grandest, most impressive-sounding multichannel systems I’ve ever heard. When everything was aligned properly, as it was at the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, the sound was breathtaking.1 When Shahin Al Rashid, EMM Labs’ extremely knowledgeable and longtime director of sales, offered for review the just-released DV2 digital-to-analog converter ($30,000), the dogs and I eagerly welcomed him to our home in Port Townsend, Washington. The model was so new—the review sample’s serial number is 10001—that Al Rashid’s guidance took the place of an owner’s manual; not until…

CHORD ELECTRONICS QUTEST D/A PROCESSOR I’ve met audiophiles who think all digital-to-analog converters sound the same. “If there’s a difference,” they declare, “it’s in the filters or output stage.” Some even believe that the whole “digital thing” was solved before we entered the 21st century. Not I. By 2005, I’d begun to think the whole digital thing would never be solved. Worse yet, I’d stopped caring. “Mechanical Sound Forever” was the song I sang. Then an old friend gave me an inexpensive D/A converter, a Halide Design DAC HD ($495, discontinued).1 I laughed when he handed me that diminutive black doodad, about the size of Zippo lighter, captured midway in the length of a nice Wireworld cable with a USB connector at one end and a pair of RCA plugs…

MAHLER Das Lied von der Erde Magdalena Kozená, mezzo-soprano; Stuart Skelton, tenor; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle BR Klassik 900172 (CD). 2018. Pauline Heister, prod.; Peter Urban, eng. DDD. TT: 64:14 Mahler’s “ninth” symphony is made up of three songs for tenor and three for mezzo (alto, really). The tenor’s songs highlight youth, love, and conviviality; the mezzo’s are not as light, filled with loneliness, the chill of winter, yearning (interrupted by a runaway horse), and the search for peace and rest. In this new recording led by Simon Rattle, tenor Stuart Skelton is remarkable in his three difficult songs with their outlandishly high tessitura, singing with bright, accurate tone and clean German diction. He also sings high soft notes as instructed, and wisely and correctly differentiates the…

Lately, there’s been too much gear worth covering and not enough space to cover it in. So this time … less think-piece filler and more hardware! GRADO LABS LINEAGE EPOCH MONO CARTRIDGE The Lineage Epoch Mono is based on Grado’s stereo Epoch, which I reviewed in my December 2017 column, and to which it looks identical. According to John Grado, who hand-builds each one, while the stereo version has one pair of coils per channel, the mono version has just a single pair of coils, configured to pick up a single channel; the resulting signal is then fed to both outputs. Grado says that great care is taken to ensure that the signals appearing on both pairs of output pins are “absolutely equal. The per-channel specifications listed on Grado’s website…

Q Acoustics was founded in the UK in 2006, but has appeared on the radar of US buyers only in the last few years. Until recently, Q has aimed its efforts at the budget sector, earning enthusiastic reviews and commercial success. But during that time the company also been quietly working on a product considerably more upscale, though still affordable in a marketplace now glutted with products at if-you-have-to-ask prices. The result is the Concept 500 ($5999.99/pair), first seen in the UK in 2017 and recently made available here. But you won’t find it at your local audio shop (if you still have one); in the US it’s sold only online, through Q Acoustics’ US website, with a 30-day, money-back guarantee that includes shipping costs—both ways. When the review samples…

I measured the Rogue RP-7 using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). The RP-7’s volume control operates in 0.5dB steps, with the maximum level indicated as “192” on the front-panel display. All of its outputs—balanced, single-ended, and headphone—preserved absolute polarity (ie, were non-inverting). The balanced input impedance measured a very high 174k ohms at 20Hz and 1kHz, dropping very slightly to 162k ohms at 20kHz; the unbalanced input impedance was lower, at 24.5k ohms at 20Hz and 1kHz, and 21k ohms at 20kHz. The RP-7’s maximum voltage gain into 100k ohms was 15.33dB for both balanced input to balanced output and unbalanced input to unbalanced output. Measured at the headphone output, the maximum gain was a very high 30.2dB into 100k ohms, which…

I measured the EMM Labs DV2 using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1), using the Audio Precision’s AES/EBU digital output—unlike JVS, I had no problems with this input—and USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro running on battery power, with Pure Music 3.0 playing WAV and AIFF test-tone files. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the EMM processor as “DV2 Reference DAC with MQA Decoder” from “EMM Labs,” with the serial number “LAB0012.” The DV2’s USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that, via USB, the DV2 accepted 16- and 24-bit integer data sampled at all rates from 32 to 384kHz. The AES/EBU and coaxial and TosLink S/PDIF inputs all locked to datastreams with sample rates of…

Having spent much of my life near Cooperstown, New York, I’m skilled at smiling placidly in response to outsiders who express enthusiasm for two things: the Baseball Hall of Fame and the collected works of James Fenimore Cooper. One of those is a dull, puffy monument to one of America’s most trivial obsessions; the other is a building filled with sports memorabilia. The Hall of Fame is okay. I spent a few lunch hours there as a teenager—I had a summer job at the A&P that used to be across the street and down the block from it. Years later, as an elementary-school teacher in the area, I brought dozens of students there on field trips. A capsule review: Walter Johnson’s locker is very cool. So is the film clip…

THE KINKS The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society: Super Deluxe Box Set Sanctuary/BMG AA09BOX (3 LPs, 3 7” EPs, 5 CDs). 1968/2018. Ray Davies, Shel Talmy, prods.; Dan Hersch, Andrew Sandoval, engs. AAA/AAD. TT: 5:46:39 The psychedelic maelstrom of 1967 was turned on its head in 1968 by a roots-rock pastoral vision largely credited to The Band’s debut, Music from Big Pink. But in England, an equally dramatic evocation of traditional musical, social, and aesthetic values was quietly espoused by The Kinks on what’s generally considered the band’s greatest album. At a time when Brexit threatens to rip the UK apart, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is a strangely prescient meditation on the details of a Britain Ray Davies recalls through a dreamlike wash of…

POLAND: WARSAW Paul Messenger The Audio Video Show, held each November in Warsaw, might be the second-largest in Europe after High End, in Munich, and each year it continues to grow. In 2018, AVS broke its records for numbers of exhibitors, exhibit rooms, and attendees, and despite its dates clashing with those of the Warsaw Motor Show and the Tokyo International Audio Show, the latter resulting in key A/V-company personnel being thin on the ground in Warsaw in 2018. Happily, there will be no such clash in 2019. The Polish audio market seems particularly buoyant right now. AVS 2018 reminded me of the US and UK hi-fi shows I attended in the 1970s and ’80s, such were the crowds, including many family groups. However, AVS seems unlikely to take over…

A couple of years ago, DeVore Fidelity’s John DeVore gave me a ride from Brooklyn, where we both live, to Michael Lavorgna’s place, in New Jersey. John was delivering a preproduction pair of his Gibbon X loudspeakers for Michael to set up in his then-new listening room, and I’d tagged along to give them a listen.1 Michael’s room and system sounded superb, and I made a mental note that when the Gibbon X went into production, we should review it. But, like all things that are important but not urgent, that idea remained on the back burner; instead, we spilled ink on DeVore’s high-efficiency Orangutan models.2 So when Jim Austin suggested, in summer 2018, that he review the Gibbon X, I readily agreed. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Spendor A7’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. The Spendor’s specified sensitivity is 88dB/2.83V/m; my estimate was close, at 87.1dB(B)/2.83V/m. The specified impedance is 8 ohms. Fig.1 shows that the A7’s impedance magnitude (solid trace) remains above 8 ohms for the entire treble and most of the low bass. The minimum magnitude was a still-high 6.1 ohms at 228Hz, and while the electrical phase angle is sometimes high, this is always when the impedance is also high, mitigating any drive difficulty. There is a small peak between 100 and 200Hz in the impedance-magnitude trace, but I found no enclosure problem in that region when I investigated the…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Q Acoustics Concept 500’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone for the nearfield responses. Q Acoustics specifies the Concept 500’s sensitivity as 90dB/W/m; my estimate was close to that, at 89.2dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is usefully higher than average. The Concept 500’s impedance is specified as 6 ohms, with a minimum magnitude of 3.7 ohms. Fig.1 shows how the Concept 500’s impedance and electrical phase varied with frequency with its reflex port open. Though the magnitude does drop below 6 ohms in the midrange, with a minimum value of 3.9 ohms at 193Hz, and there is a current-demanding combination of 5.5 ohms and–39° electrical phase angle at 99Hz, the Concept 500 will not…

FRANK KIMBROUGH, SCOTT ROBINSON, RUFUS REID, BILLY DRUMMOND Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk Sunnyside SSC-4032 (6 CDs). 2018. Frank Kimbrough, prod.; Matt Balitsaris, prod., eng. DDD. TT: 5:30:43 Worldwide, an enormous number of Thelonious Monk tributes took place in 2017, the centennial of his birth. In 2018, they kept on coming: concerts, memorials, celebrations, albums. Monk (not Ellington, not Gershwin) has become the most covered composer in jazz. Monk is like Everest: He is there. You can’t be a jazz musician without coming to terms with him. Of all the events surrounding the Monk centennial, the one with the most long-term value is Monk’s Dreams. A quartet led by pianist Frank Kimbrough went into Maggie’s Farm studio in Pennsylvania in May 2018 and recorded 68 tracks…

Only a few months after the extraordinary news and release of John Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album on Impulse! Records, which revealed the tenor and soprano saxophonist deep in transitional mode, comes Universal Music/Verve’s attempt to cash in on the Trane fever. Joining music from The Lost Album with selections from other albums recorded by Coltrane in that year, 1963: New Directions brings Coltrane’s legacy to our commercially crass, modern marketplace. Okay—that’s how I imagine my compadres in the press describing this mother lode of early-’60s recordings, available as sets of three CDs and five LPs. Some journos bashed and trashed the authenticity of The Lost Album, noting that since the original tapes had been put up for auction before Universal claimed copyright, they weren’t “lost” at…