Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Stereophile

High End Munich ended a successful 21-year run at its current venue, the MOC center, on a high note. Here’s a sampling of the many product debuts at the show. For more coverage including product debuts, see stereophile.com/category/munich-2025. 01 AUDIOVECTOR R 10 ARRETÉ. $165,000/pair flagship floorstanders with 13 drivers per speaker including dual AMT tweeters, midrange drivers with carbon-sandwich cones, and rear-mounted bass drivers. Uses proprietary airflow and damping systems to manage resonance and dispersion. ❱ YG ACOUSTICS GEMINI. The Gemini can be configured in three ways: passive, fully active, or with only the woofer active. Standing 215cm tall and weighing 455kg per side, the passive version is priced around €900,000/pair. 02 BURMESTER REFERENCE LINE. Burmester unveiled a complete refresh of its Reference line, comprising the 257 turntable, 249 preamplifier, and…

It was supposed to be so simple, a well-trod path I’ve followed almost every May for the last decade: A six-day trip to Munich to attend the final Munich High End Show before it decamps to Vienna next year. I see any trip to Europe as an opportunity to replenish my personal stash of Anthon Berg Danish marzipan bars, a childhood favorite with a crack-like addictive pull. My flights and hotel were booked months in advance. I was ready to go. Then Jim Austin, my esteemed editor, asked if I could attend an event at the Clearaudio factory in Erlangen a couple of days before the show, where they would be launching an unspecified new product. I’m the Spin Doctor, and Clearaudio makes record spinners, so of course I said…

Weiss Engineering D/A processors are widely known for their high quality, in both home-audio and pro-audio circles. Over several Stereophile reviews, they have always measured well. Oh, and did you know they’d won a Grammy Award? Weiss Engineering founder and chief designer Daniel Weiss won the 2021 Grammy Award for Technical Merit for his pioneering work during the ’80s and ’90s designing digital equipment for mastering studios. Daniel is in good company: Another winner of the same award is Thomas Edison—though, unlike Daniel, Edison won it long after he was dead. Daniel is one of those audio people that Herb Reichert would call a Wizard. He took part in the digital revolution just as it was taking off, at the tail end of the 1970s, and has focused his whole…

Horn players were always the show ponies of bebop. While drummer Art Blakey, pianist Thelonious Monk, and other instrumentalists were also powerful pioneers, it was the saxophonists, building on the legacy of the great Charlie Parker, who’ve come to symbolize this once-hated, now-revered form of jazz. While the tenors and altos got the lion’s share of saxophone glory, baritone players also made their mark, on bebop and also swing. Perhaps the most famous is Harry Carney, a mainstay of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Serge Chaloff, Pepper Adams, Gerry Mulligan, and Cecil Payne are all baritone sax players of note. More recently, Gary Smulyan and Hamiet Bluiett have added their distinctive voices. Demanding more air and a different, more supportive embouchure, the baritone sax emits an unforgettable tone. Often described as…

I’d been building and repairing tube amplifiers for a few years when my first Altec A5 Voice of the Theater speakers arrived. I bought them to help me evaluate the sound of low-powered triode amps—but whoa! The moment I turned that VOT system on, I heard from 30' away the sound of either a waterfall or a large AM radio tuned between stations. When I checked my amplification for hum and standing noise, everything was at or near what I considered “spec” for zero-feedback tube amps. Apparently those specs needed revising. Meanwhile, I was fascinated by how a very sensitive speaker could show me so clearly what free electrons were doing inside my amplifiers. What’s the best tube tester? A 107dB/watt speaker. One reason audiophiles like me use step-up transformers…

Imagine navigating the hectic rooms of an audio show at which a sea of similar-looking, similar-sounding gear blends into a predictable thrum, drawing a chorus of familiar nods. Then you stumble into the room occupied by Rich Pinto and his Treehaus Audiolab components. Here, the expected evaporates, replaced by designs that offer something different, both inside and out, sparking curiosity among jaded journalists and seasoned listeners. Now step into the Southport, Connecticut, workshop of Tree-haus Audiolab, where Rich Pinto crafts Treehaus Audiolab’s products, loosely but richly inspired by echoes of Western Electric and Klangfilm. Picture SET amplifiers and SUTs forged like ’50s-era muscle car motors standing in contrast to field coil loudspeakers that recall large woodland sprites. Artistry and engineering intertwine: Pinto shapes the handsome, industrial-looking exteriors, while Radu Tarta…

MOST AUDIO ENGINEERS SPLIT HAIRS. EELCO GRIMM SPLITS MICROSECONDS. HIS EXPERTISE IN HIGH-PRECISION AUDIO LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR GRIMM AUDIO, THE DUTCH VENTURE HE COFOUNDED IN 2004 WITH FELLOW ELECTRICAL ENGINEER GUIDO TENT. THE COMPANY’S MASTER CLOCKS AND DACS, DEVELOPED FOR BOTH THE PRO AUDIO AND HOME HI-FI MARKETS, COMBAT TINY TIMING ERRORS AND JITTER THAT CAN BLIGHT DIGITAL AUDIO. But Grimm Audio’s engineering acumen also extends to the analog domain, as evidenced by the LS1c active speaker system that made the cover of Stereophile’s April 2025 issue.1 In John Atkinson’s measurements section accompanying my admiring review, JA wrote that over his 40-odd years of bench-testing audio equipment, the LS1c is “the best-measuring loudspeaker I have encountered.” Considering that accolade plus glowing Stereophile reviews of the Grimm Audio MU1 music…

Each time I approach a new recording, the music always comes first. In that spirit, with thoughts of savoring the abundant beauties in six of the eight Sonatas for Violin Solo that Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber dedicated to Maximilian Gandolf Graf von Kuenburg, the Archbishop of Salzburg, in 1681, I cued up Channel Classics’ latest offering, Just Biber. But once I heard the first 10 seconds of the 70-minute recording, the union of its extraordinarily silent background with its abundance of color and clarity, captured to perfection by engineer Jared Sacks, left me in awe. Given that Sacks records in DSD256 with excellent equipment—he uses a Merging Technologies Horus A/D converter, Brüel & Kjaer 4006 and Schoeps microphones, a Pyramix workstation (also from Merging Technologies), van den Hul 3T…

It’s a spring day, midweek, and I’m behind the desk of the small-town library where I work part-time. A woman comes in, late 60s, maybe 70. There is a quietness about her, as if time has asked her to shrink a little. She’s local, but we’ve never met. “Laura,” she offers. Her handshake is firm. Laura tells me she’s heard through a mutual friend that I have a high-end music system and write for Stereophile. Her husband, Ted, loved the magazine. Ted, she says, died a decade ago, at 60. She recounts how, a few months later, she met up with someone to hand over many boxes of old Stereophile issues. As they carried them out to his car, the recipient’s wife looked unhappier and madder with each box. The…

Analyses of the latest Goldman Sachs “Music in the Air” report show how the same news can be interpreted in different ways. Billboard sees it in a negative light: “Goldman Sachs Lowers Global Music Industry Growth Forecast, Wiping Out $2.5 Billion.” Music Business Worldwide is more measured, writing, “Despite revising some forecasts downward following a slower-than-expected 2024, Goldman Sachs maintains a positive long-term outlook for the music industry.” The Billboard article is good, but the headline is clickbait. The Goldman Sachs report didn’t wipe out $2.5 billion. Rather, it reported a less optimistic forecast, projecting lower future revenues than last year’s report projected: The value wiped out was never real. 2024 was, however, a disappointing year relative to previous years and to Goldman Sachs’s expectations. The International Federation of the…

As someone who has consistently enjoyed the sonic benefits of MQA, I found a recent MQA Labs press release tantalizing. “MQA Labs Debuts FOQUS ADC Design with First Ever Demonstration, Showcases Full Technology Suite,” it declared. It continued, “Highlights will include a first listen to audio captured with a FOQUS ADC chip, showcasing the enhanced clarity made possible by a reimagined decimation process.” The press release promised further surprises, including “a walk-through of our new and upcoming studio plug-ins, offering creators powerful tools for managing impulse response and noise shaping,” and “a showcase of QRONO d2a, our playback solution that delivers unmatched transparency and time performance across all audio formats.” The company claims that these technologies improve sound quality from creation through playback, all in pursuit of “digital audio with…

During the past decade and a half, the trips I’ve taken have tended to be for magazine stories. I love to travel, but as a New Yorker living on a writer’s income, I figure it makes more sense to do it on someone else’s dime and stay in nicer places than I could afford otherwise. The downside is that these trips don’t feel like vacations, or even particularly restful: My time tends to be taken up with interviews, overly elaborate meals eaten (or tasted) in the company of chefs and winemakers, weeks when I sometimes stay in four hotels, and (gratefully infrequent) run-ins with publicists. I’ve gone years without taking an actual vacation, when all I want is to hole up in a beach town in the Yucatán and do…

A century ago, pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung had a wild encounter with the power of sound. “In a village on the way from Lake Albert to Rejaf in the Sudan we had a very exciting experience,” Jung wrote in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He goes on to describe his participation in a tribal drum and dance ritual. “Night had fallen … when we heard drums and horn blasts. Soon some sixty men appeared, martially equipped with flashing lances, clubs, and swords.” A huge fire was built. Women and children began dancing around the fire, and the men formed an outer ring. Jung’s guides and armed guards fled the scene. Jung continued: “The men’s chorus began to sing, vigorous, bellicose melodies, not unharmonious, and at the same time began to swing…

For thoughts about cables generally and reviewing methodology, see Martin Colloms’s essay “Colloms on Cables” at stereophile.com/content/colloms-cables. Ray Kimber founded his enterprise1 in the late 1970s, and for the last half-century has withstood the ravages of this difficult market. He first got involved in cable technology while addressing the problems of induced interference in audio connections where high-power installation lighting was involved, especially early thyristor-controlled systems. He found that standard braided shielding was effective with regards to induced noise but that such methods impaired sound quality. As an alternative, he began trials with variations on the classic twisted-pair conductor geometry, which is self-screening to some degree, avoiding the need for an external shield. This approach proved promising for sound quality and was the first step on the road to novel,…