Every month Stereophile magazine offers authoritative reviews, informed recommendations, helpful advice, and controversial opinions, all stemming from the revolutionary idea that audio components should be judged on how they reproduce music.
THIS ISSUE: A noncynical formula for expanding our industry. Yesterday, I had a brief conversation, by text message, with my 26-year-old son. He had just walked by the Devialet shop at the Shoppes at Columbus Circle here in Manhattan. Knowing my interest in such things, he sent me a photo. The Devialet boutique seems more a design exhibit than a shop, in a high-ceilinged open area. The shops at the Shoppes at Columbus Circle include Hugo Boss, Eileen Fisher, and Floga, which sells furs, among less-exclusive brands, though even the less-exclusive stores look fancy. Upstairs from the Shoppes is the Mandarin Oriental New York Hotel, where rooms cost about $1k/night and up, and some notable restaurants, among them Thomas Keller’s Per Se, and Masa, a three-star Michelin restaurant where dinner…
TAKE HEED! Unless marked otherwise, all letters to the magazine and its writers are assumed to be for possible publication. Please include your name and physical address. We reserve the right to edit for length and content. On measurements Love the measurements! Love the charts! Let’s have more. Every issue delves into the objective qualities of performance. It is wonderful. It is valuable. It may be the essential reason Stereophile magazine endures to this day. Let’s have more. Each issue should briefly review 1 measurement and chart. Say, for example, figure 1, frequency response at 2.83 volts into simulated 8, 4, and 2 loudspeaker ohms. This can be explained in a lot more detail, how and why, with both best- and worst-case examples from the archives. A different “behind the…
SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should email the when, where, and who to stletters@stereophile.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the December 2024 issue is September 20, 2024. RONDI D’AGOSTINO, REST IN PEACE Jason Victor Serinus Rondi Halling D’Agostino (1946–2024), owner of Krell Industries, died unexpectedly from a fall on June 18. Everyone I spoke with—former husband Dan D’Agostino and their son Kristofer D’Agostino, industry veteran Peter McGrath, Transparent Audio CEO Karen Sumner, former employer Mark Levinson, Krell President Arnold Martinez, former Krell COO Walter Schofield—said the same thing: Rondi was one of the nicest, sweetest, and most committed people with whom they had ever worked and shared parts of their lives. “When I met Rondi in the early ’70s,…
THIS ISSUE: Herb auditions TEAC’s VRDS-701T CD transport. It’s the late 1980s, and I’m soldering tube amplifiers on a plywood bench. I decide on a whim that it’s time to break down and buy a CD player to supplement the Dynaco tuner and Dual cassette deck in my workroom music system. I was a slow starter with digital because of my early take on CD sound: It was emotionally drained with grumbling distortions in the bass and an off-timbre midrange, crowned by a thin, artificial treble, and penetrated by an eerie, unnatural silence whenever the musicians stopped playing. I thought cassettes had higher fidelity and that CDs would be a passing fad, but I kept browsing CDs at Tower Records, and the itch to buy some was getting pretty strong.…
THIS ISSUE: High End Munich and the Ortofon Cadenza Mono phono cartridge. “Schwabing isn’t a neighborhood, but a state of being,” declared the Countess Fanny zu Reventlow, an early feminist who scandalized German society by parenting out of wedlock, carrying a revolver, and practicing what today tends to be called ethical nonmonogamy. Thomas Mann described the fellow denizens of this northern corner of Munich as “the most singular, the most delicate, the boldest exotic plants.” At the turn of the last century, Schwabing was on its way to becoming the artistic epicenter of Europe, a laboratory for the most progressive social ideas, and arguably the birthplace of modernity. Kandinsky made Western art’s first abstract painting while living there; local cafes once patronized by Lenin would soon host a young Adolf…
THIS ISSUE: Transimpedance monoblock phono preamplifiers from Sutherland and a new version of the Dynavector XX moving coil phono cartridge. Ron Sutherland makes a strong case for being crowned the king of all phono preamps, though I expect he would blush at any such suggestion. In 1979, with degrees in physics and electronic engineering (where his final project involved designing and building a digital logic–controlled preamp), he teamed up with Gayle Sanders to found electrostatic speaker company MartinLogan. (“Martin” and “Logan” are Sanders’ and Sutherland’s middle names, respectively.) But after a few years, he found the increasingly corporate mindset at M-L a bit stifling, so he decided to go his own way. Ron wanted to build gear he thought was cool and fun while not being directed solely by its…
