Stereophile February 2020

My first exposure to current-mode phono preamplification was maybe a dozen years ago, when such products were new. The one I received, though nicely packaged, was not ready for prime time. I never smelled smoke, but I never heard sound, either: If it wasn’t DOA, it was at a minimum DSAA—Dead Soon After Arrival. If you’ve followed our coverage, you know that prime time has arrived for current-mode phono preamps. Over the last year, Stereophile has reviewed, in columns or regular reviews, The Loco ($8200) and Little Loco ($3400), both from Sutherland Engineering; the Lino C 2.0 from Channel D ($2400); and the pithily named Haniwa HEQ-A03-CI ($12,000). Michael Fremer reviewed van den Hul’s The Grail ($9350) in August 2018, and the same issue contained his Follow-Up on his reference,…

Where do I want my music to take me? Editor: Mr. Austin, you are so correct in your editorial “Spirited away by music” (AWSI, Vol.42 No.10). I often think of my record collection (be it vinyl or digital) as a library of souls captured in a specific time and place. When I sit down to listen I’ll ask myself, “Where do I want to go?” or “How do I feel now, and who else in my library feels that exact same way right now?” From that beginning, I’ll let those souls take me along a path that can lead me to happiness, or sadness, to full-on party mode or to intellectual insights I never had before. Many times, I’ll jump around from artist to artist as they lead me down…

US: NEW YORK, NY Jason Victor Serinus On November 8, at the very small New York Audio Show, Paris-based music streaming service Qobuz announced that it has streamlined its subscription plans, lowered prices—and eliminated MP3 files from its streaming catalog. At a press event, Dan Mackta, managing director of Qobuz USA, said that Qobuz now offers “Studio Premier” subscriptions for $14.99/month or $149.99 for a full year. Studio Premier grants subscribers unlimited access to Qobuz’s catalog of more than 50 million CD-quality tracks and also millions of hi-rez tracks up to a resolution of 24/192. Qobuz will continue to offer its “Sublime+” plan ($249.99/year), which includes streaming access plus a “substantial” discount for hi-rez download purchases from the Qobuz store. The service’s other plans have been eliminated—which means, importantly, that…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, email Chris Vogel at vgl@cfl.rr.com. (Note the new email address.) Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless it is associated with a seminar or similar event. ARIZONA ❚ Wednesday, January 29, 2020, 7–9pm: Andrew Jones of Elac will be speaking to the Arizona Audio/Video Club on the art and science of speaker design. The event will be held in the recreation room of Faith Lutheran Church at 801 E Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85014. This event is for members only. For more information on joining the Arizona Audio/Video Club and attending…

In 2013, when I first wrote about it,1 the TechDAS Air Force One ($105,000) was that company’s best and most expensive turntable; it joined the handful of products that have earned an A+ in our semiannual Recommended Components feature—a rating that remained in place for six years. But too much time has passed since the Air Force One was auditioned by a Stereophile writer, so it has now fallen from that list. The Air Force One is still available, but it’s now a special-order product that, according to distributor Graham Engineering, can take up to six months to deliver. So rather than revisit the One, I decided to check out the readily available Air Force One Premium—the upgraded and costlier version ($145,000). The TechDAS Air Force Two and Air Force…

Only recently did I learn that successive generations of the Chevrolet Corvette are referred to by the cognoscenti with two-character alpha-numeric identifiers: C1, C2, C3, and so on. I learned this while reading about the most recent version—C8, known to non-cognoscenti as the 2020 Corvette—which happens to be the first version since C2 that impresses me. (I say that as one who used to work for the owner of a C3, a then-middle-aged male who actually boasted, while under the influence, that he and two of his C3-owning friends drove them solely because their juvenile styling attracted juveniles. Rest assured I left his employ within days of that revelation.) In most ways, the Shindo Cortese power amplifier ($13,500 with F2a output tubes) is as far from an audio Corvette as…