Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Stereophile

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…

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.…

In Serinusland, smooth sailing has never been guaranteed. Some months back, for reasons not yet determined, my Stromtank S 2500 Quantum MK II power regenerator1 began to hum mechanically—sometimes steadily, sometimes with a pulse—whenever I turned on battery mode. Simultaneously, the Dan D’Agostino Master Systems Momentum HD preamp’s power supply began to hum.2 I could listen through the hum—it wasn’t that loud—but silence between tracks was a thing of the past, and rarely was the noise in the right key. After Stromtank’s remote diagnostic and repair procedure failed, Stromtank Chief Engineer/founder Wolfgang Meletzky left Berlin for a previously scheduled visit to D’Agostino headquarters in Arizona. Tests there revealed that Stromtank and this D’Agostino preamp mated perfectly, without generating hum, buzz, pulse, or anything else. With fingers now pointing at the…

I measured a Dynaudio Contour 30i loudspeaker with serial number 10154186. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system, a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone, and an Earthworks microphone preamplifier to measure the quasi-anechoic frequency- and timedomain behavior in the farfield. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone for the nearfield responses and Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system to measure the impedance magnitude and phase. Dynaudio specifies the Contour 30i’s voltage sensitivity as 87dB/2.83V/m. My B-weighted estimate, measured on the tweeter axis without the grille, was slightly higher, at 87.8dB(B)/2.83V/m. The Contour 30i’s nominal impedance is specified as 4 ohms. The impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) was close to 4 ohms between 100Hz and 400Hz and ranged between 6 ohms and 9 ohms in the treble. The minimum impedance was 3.3 ohms at 190Hz. The…

One of the pleasures of reviewing—and also using—products from Pass Laboratories is an encounter with Nelson Pass’s writing, which can usually be found in the owner’s manual and is always competent, insightful, and sometimes funny. How often do you get real pleasure and insight from reading an owner’s manual? Pass Labs has a lot of owner’s manuals online. Reading through one, I encountered the following passage; you’ll find the same or similar language in other manuals and on the Pass Labs website. I present it not only because I admire it and agree with the philosophy it expresses but also because it captures the spirit of the product under review—the XP-27 phono preamplifier ($12,075 in silver)—at least as I’ve experienced it during an extended review period. Here it is, quoted…

I measured one of the Piega Coax Gen2 811 loudspeakers auditioned by RvB. It had the serial number 8057. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system, a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone, and an Earthworks microphone preamplifier to measure the quasi-anechoic frequency- and time-domain behavior in the farfield. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone for the nearfield responses. Before I started the testing, I made sure the short wire jumpers that connect the two pairs of binding posts were securely fastened. The Coax 811’s voltage sensitivity is specified as a high 92dB/W/m. My B-weighted estimate, measured on the tweeter axis, was significantly lower, at 85.1dB(B)/2.83V/m. Piega specifies the Coax 811’s nominal impedance as 4 ohms. The impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace), examined with Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system, was close to 4 ohms…

THIS ISSUE: Two recent vinyl reissues put two of Detroit’s best on display. Detroit became a destination for migrating African Americans early, starting with the Underground Railroad; the city’s proximity to Canada was convenient for those seeking to escape Southern slavery. The mass human movement accelerated with the Great Migration, which started about 1910, when millions of African Americans left the Jim Crow South for northern cities. The same human movement that brought the blues to Chicago and jazz to New York City took both to Detroit. In all those cities, the 1920s was a time of ballrooms and big music halls. In Detroit, “society bands” black and white played through-composed, jazz-inflected music, according to a narrative put together by Cliff Coleman and Jim Ruffner for the local jazz museum.1…

THIS ISSUE: Roy Hall, founder and former CEO of Music Hall, enjoys the many pleasures of the Far East one more time. First comes the anticipation, that initial jet of warm water, that miraculous searching, finding the sweet spot, then heaven on earth as it cleans and caresses. As if by magic, warm, soothing wafts of air gently and sensuously dry my tush. I had forgotten just how wonderful Japanese toilets can be. It was 5am in Tokyo. I was on my way to Hong Kong, but my ticket demanded a change of planes. Haneda Airport was empty, save for a woman driving a golf cart. She offered me a ride to the other side of the airport where some restaurants were. As we drove off, the cart started playing…

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…

JVS’s sample of the Dan D’Agostino Relentless could not be shipped to me in time for my test results to be published in this issue. I therefore performed the measurements on a different sample of the Relentless, serial number 1035, at Manhattan dealer Innovative Audio. (My thanks to Innovative’s Elliot Fishkin and Chris Forman.) I examined the performance with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1). The Relentless preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting) and with the volume control set to the maximum of “99,” the gain was inconsequentially higher than the specified 6dB, at 6.28dB. (This was the gain setting Innovative had been using; I didn’t test the preamplifier with its maximum gain set to the alternative of 10dB.) The volume control operated…

I measured the Pass Labs XP-27 phono preamplifier with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 repeating some tests with the magazine’s higher-resolution APx500 analyzer. To minimize noise, I connected a wire from the grounding terminal on the preamplifier chassis’s rear panel to the analyzer ground connections. The XP-27 gets warm. The temperature of the top panel after an hour of testing was 99.5°F (37.5°C). The inputs preserved absolute polarity from both the balanced and single-ended outputs. The gain from the balanced outputs was fairly close to the numeric values: 57.85dB with the gain set to “53,” 65.5dB with it set to “66,” and 77.5dB with it set to “76.” The gains from the single-ended outputs were exactly 6dB lower than these values. The input impedances were close to the values set with…

THIS ISSUE: UMG releases an expansive new Mind Games. After a wild decade in the biggest pop music group ever, John Lennon’s post-Beatles years were spent in protest, in various kinds of therapy, in immigration court, and in search of a new musical identity. He had been a musician since age 16 and a superstar since his early 20s. He was only in his 30s. By summer 1973, when Lennon’s fourth album, Mind Games, was recorded at New York’s Record Plant Studios, the turbulence of Lennon’s life seas was at gale force. He was separating from Yoko Ono and starting a 16-month relationship (consummated at Ono’s suggestion) with their shared administrative assistant, May Pang. The Nixon Administration was targeting Lennon and Ono for deportation because of their left-wing political activities,…

THIS ISSUE: With a focus on design, a Los Angeles–based hi-fi store is redefining what a modern-day brick-and-mortar dealership can be. In the e-commerce era, brick-and-mortar dealerships must give customers compelling reasons to stop by. Los Angeles hi-fi dealership Common Wave’s owner Wesley Katzir keeps customers coming through the door with a simple idea: that music matters in our everyday lives and that what he enjoys, other people will enjoy, too. That extends not just to music but also design, which is a particular preoccupation of Katzir and his business. “I wanted to create a hi-fi space for people who were interested in the same sorts of musical and listening experiences as I am, which is much more communal,” Katzir told me in a recent phone conversation. “We have enough…

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…

Modern turntables are a paradox. The ever-evolving technology beneath their sleek exteriors fascinates me. The high-end turntable market these days can feel less like a haven for music lovers and more like a brutalist arms race in pursuit of maximum audio extraction. Yet, it’s not all about performance. Many new ’tables are adorned with outlandish, purely cosmetic flourishes that cause me to chuckle. Some super-bling record players, with their jutting angles and industrial menace, evoke the chrome carcass of the Battlestar Galactica, a testament to mechanical might. Others are even more menacing, channeling the mirror-finish abyss of Darth Vader’s helmet, gleaming with a promise of sonic domination—but is that an invitation or a threat? Setting aside those cosmetic affectations, it’s a war, and the enemy—well, the main enemy anyway—is vibrations,…

THIS ISSUE: Believe it or not: new music from Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney. At this late date, it seems impossible that there could still be “lost” albums lingering in the vaults by musicians as important and successful as Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney. And yet Universal Music has just released “new” albums by both artists that significantly add to their already hallowed recording catalogs. In 1993, just prior to meeting producer Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash, who was then between record label deals, tracked an album’s worth of demos in Nashville. Longtime Cash pal Waylon Jennings sang on two tracks. The idea was to shop all the recordings to record labels. For Johnny Cash Songwriter, Cash’s son John Carter Cash and longtime engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson preserved Cash’s vocals from the…

Until now, Ryan Truesdell has been known for producing two of the most important jazz records of the second decade of the current millennium. Centennial, in 2012, and Lines of Color, in 2015, contained newly discovered works by the great composer/arranger Gil Evans. They were lavish productions with huge world-class New York orchestras. The many honors they received included a Grammy award and multiple Grammy nominations. Now Truesdell has a new project. His ensemble size has shrunk, but his ambition has not. Synthesis is a three-CD set containing new original works for string quartet by 15 large-ensemble jazz composers including himself. You read that right: Synthesis is a jazz album with three hours of string quartet music. Truesdell explains: “We were at the point in the pandemic when groups larger…

THIS ISSUE: Representatives of Grimm Audio, EMT, and TEAC respond to our reviews of their products. Grimm MU2 Many thanks to Stereophile and Kalman Rubinson for reviewing the Grimm Audio MU2 Streaming DAC/Preamplifier (Vol.47 No.8). Kal’s listening and John’s measurements confirm the design intent of the MU2. It is also fitting that this achievement be recognized in 2024, which is Grimm Audio’s 20th anniversary. What more can be said about the outstanding performance, features, and value represented by the MU2, beyond what was articulated in this review? We would encourage any audio enthusiast to seek out and experience what the remarkable MU2 can do to enhance their system and their emotional connection to music. Eelco Grimm and Guido Tent for the Grimm Audio team EMT 928 II Thank you, Ken…