Innehållsförteckning för Aug-12 från Stereophile

After all this time, I think I finally get it. I was recently reunited with an old friend from high school. My best friend from high school, in fact. Our families got together, everyone got along, and as the dust of conversation settled toward the rug of companionable silence, talk turned to work. And when the inevitable happened, and my old friend and his wife—classical-music lovers both—asked how much a person had to spend these days in order to get a good music system, I answered their question with a question—a question that, crazily enough, just popped into my head: “Do you want an appliance that’ll get the job done, or do you have faith that a good system can transform listening into something special?” My friend looked at me…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@vcable.us. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA • Sunday, August 19, 12–4pm: The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting in the Penthouse Ballroom of the Buena Park Holiday Inn (7000 Beach Boulevard). With a special focus on affordable audio equipment, the event will feature Dynamic Design cables, ModWright amplification and source components, and Van L. SpeakerWorks loudspeakers. Representatives from each company will be on hand to discuss their products. Eastwind…

Why vintage? Because the best vintage gear offers an abundance of musically agreeable qualities that are missing from even the best contemporary gear. Those qualities may or may not be crucial to your enjoyment of recorded music (the liberated male of the 21st century is free to prioritize for himself those aspects of playback fidelity that matter most, some of which aren’t at all well served by antique equipment), and the difficulty and expense of going retro can prove too much for those with too little time, too little money, and too little background knowledge. Yet for some of us, the characteristics associated with vintage gear are precisely the things we seek. Not that we go looking for abuse. Consider that there are contemporary phono products that offer at least…

“Steven was 12 when we started playing with Black Flag—he wasn’t even a teenager,” says his older brother, Jeff McDonald, guitarist and lead singer of Redd Kross. “The only punk shows back then were in Hollywood, and they were few and far between. At the time, we were a band that was desperately trying to play, so I would cold-call every band—so many people were listed [in the phone book], members of The Dickies, X—and everyone blew us off. And then when I got the Black Flag single, I noticed Lawndale was their PO Box, and that’s the next town from Hawthorne. I got their number somehow and I talked to Greg Ginn, and he said, ‘C’mon down to our rehearsal space.’ It was in an old church in Hermosa…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the ADAM Classic Column MK3’s frequency response in the farfield. For the nearfield responses I used an Earthworks QTC-40, with its small, 1/4" capsule. I left the speaker’s grille off for these measurements. My estimate of the ADAM’s voltage sensitivity was 88.5dB(B)/2.83V/m: slightly below the specified 90dB. The impedance remained below 6 ohms for much of the midrange and bass (fig.1), with a minimum magnitude of 3.35 ohms at 155Hz. The electrical phase angle was generally low, but the rising impedance and increasingly capacitive angle below 25Hz suggest the presence of a DCblocking capacitor in the woofer feed. While there is a suspicious-looking discontinuity at 600Hz in the impedance trace, I found no cabinet resonances at…

Description Two-way, reflex-loaded bookshelf loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) ferrofluid-cooled, titanium-dome tweeter; 4" (102mm), clay/ceramicfilled, polypropylene-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: 2.2kHz. Crossover slopes: fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley. Frequency response: 55Hz–23kHz, ±3dB; –10dB at 50Hz. Sensitivity: 85dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Minimum impedance: 4 ohms. Power handling: 10–80W recommended, 60W program. Dimensions 9.25" (234mm) H by 5.75" (143mm) W by 8.375" (212mm) D. Internal volume: 0.1 cubic foot (2.8 liters). Weight: 6.5 lbs (3kg) each net, 15.5 lbs (7kg)/pair shipping. Finishes Black Ash, Dark Cherry, Walnut wood veneers; Gloss Black or Gloss White, add $70/pair. Serial Numbers of Units Reviewed 16150 101967 & ’968. Price $760/pair. Imagine Mini PFS-27 stands, $300/pair; PWB-1 wall brackets, $100/pair. Approximate number of dealers: 300. Manufacturer PSB Speakers International, 633 Granite Court, Pickering, Ontario L1W 3K1, Canada. Tel: (905) 831-6555.…

We’ve all read about how bookstores, appliance stores, and other bricks-and-mortar retailers are suffering with the increasing domination of Internet sales. That got me thinking about audio dealers. I’ve always believed that one can’t really make an informed purchase of audiophile equipment without hearing it in a system properly set up by and at a serious audio retailer. Here in New York City, we’re blessed with six first-rate audio dealers in Manhattan alone, with more in the suburbs. I estimate that 90% of the products reviewed in Stereophile can be auditioned at a dealer or two within a two-hour drive of anywhere in the New York metropolitan area. Not so for rural audiophiles, and that’s where companies such as Emotiva come in. Dan Laufman was fed up with the rising…

Analog Sources VPI TNT IV, Rega Planar 3 turntables; Immedia, Syrinx PU-3 tonearms; Koetsu Urushi, Clearaudio Virtuoso Wood cartridges. Digital Sources Lector CDP-7T, Creek Destiny CD players. Preamplification Vendetta Research SCP-2D phono stage, Audio Valve Eclipse line stage. Power Amplifier Audio Research Reference 110. Integrated Amplifier Creek Destiny. Loudspeakers Epos M5i, Dynaudio Excite X12, Wharfedale Diamond 10.1. Cables Interconnect (all MIT): Magnum M3, MI-350 CVTwin Terminator, MI-330SG Terminator. Speaker: Acarian Systems Black Orpheus. Accessories Various by ASC, Bright Star, Celestion, Echo Busters, Salamander Designs, Simply Physics, Sound Anchor, VPI.…

To perform measurements on the darTZeel NHB-458, I used Stereophile’s loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/108awsi/index.html). Before testing one of the monoblocks (serial number TZ-UA1458-538L), I ran it at 1.3 its rated power into 8 ohms for 60 minutes, which thermally is the worst case for an amplifier with a class-A/B output stage. At the end of that period, while the shrouded heatsink on the amplifier’s rear was too hot to keep my hand on, at 63.5°C/146°F, the top of the enclosure was only warm, at 40.8°C/107.4°F, according to my infrared thermometer. The THD+noise with the amplifier stone cold was 0.08%; after an hour with the amplifier hot, it had risen slightly, to 0.083%.a much smaller…

Description Solid-state, bus-powered, plug-and-play digital-to-analog converter with tethered input and output cables. Digital input: USB 1.1 operating in isochronous asynchronous mode with 24-bit word length and sample rates of 44.1, 48, 88.2, and 96kHz. Analog outputs: left & right RCA (unbalanced). Output impedance: 200 ohms. Output level: 2V RMS. Dimensions 2m cable length standard. Weight: almost nothing. Serial number of unit reviewed 3100064. Price $495 with 2m cable. Other lengths available: 3m, add $20; 5m, add $60; 7m, add $100. Approximate number of dealers: 12; also sold direct. Manufacturer Halide Design. Tel: (858) 224-3551. www.halidedesign.com.…

When Stephen Mejias reviewed Polk Audio’s RTi A3 loudspeaker3 in the July 2012 issue (p.49), what he heard from this relatively inexpensive ($399.95/pair) bookshelf model impressed him: “The Polk’s overall sound was . . . tonally correct and well balanced . . . with clean, clear mids and vibrant highs.” He concluded that the sound was “unusually lively and present, with fast transients, lots of detail, and well-extended highs [and] a muscularity, weight, and solidity that made listening to well-recorded rock an absolute, fist-pumping joy.” Intrigued by Stephen’s comments, and by Robert J. Reina’s review of the smaller but otherwise similar RTi A1 ($349.95/pair) in September 2008, I subjected the RTi A3 to my usual test regime. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to…

Power of Delight Life can be full of fine lines—like that fabled one between love and hate. Or the passionate edge that separates murder (bad) and sex (good). Another confounding verge separates sagacious wizardry from indulgent blather. My old friend Howe Gelb, a gifted thinker, wordsmith, and musical presence, excels at gleefully—yet with genuine gravitas—skipping back and forth across and busting through many of these lines whether he’s playing piano as a guest of M. Ward, or leading his long-running, ever-evolutionary musical project Giant Sand—or holding forth as he sits with me in the sun, drinking black coffee on the sun-splashed roof of his publicist’s office building, off 30th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. “I’m of the mind that the soul that riots inside of us is often not singular,”…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR Stereophile & the iPad 3 Editor: I subscribe to Stereophile via Apple’s newsstand, and have been hoping each month that you upgrade the resolution of your publication to match that of the new iPad 3. No luck, even for your June publication. It’s basically unreadable, and an unpleasant reading experience. I subscribe to several other publications, including Photoshop and Photography and Wired Magazine . . . all perfect. When will Stereophile be fixing this? —Russ Gittleson Johannesburg, South Africa russ@lightkinetics.com I understand that the iPad 3’s Retina display takes longer to fully render a pdf than the earlier iPads, depending on the complexity of the page. If the magazine first comes up with ragged text and you zoom it out and back in again, it does…

“No [other] subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom.” Adam Gopnik was writing about wine in his latest book, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011; p.178). It comes out in paperback on August 21. We met up with Adam in last month’s column. Most of the book originally appeared as essays in The New Yorker, where you can swallow your Gopnik in small gulps. For a taste of the tome, you can savor Chapter 10, whose title asks “In Vino Veritas?” Gopnik pegs wine critic Robert Parker as a quintessentially American number cruncher. Parker’s newsletter, The Wine Advocate, grades the chateaux of France on a 100-point system: “What…

It was another flawlessly beautiful spring morning, and I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to help John Atkinson pack up the Lansche Audio 5.1 loudspeakers ($41,000/pair). John had only just completed his listening and bench tests (see his review in the July issue), and was not ready to let go of the lovely Lansches—but the speakers would be picked up by a trucking company that afternoon and sent to our cover photographer, Eric Swanson, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each Lansche measures 40.9" tall by 10.1" W by 19.3" D and weighs 167.5 lbs—packing them and securing them to a shipping pallet is definitely a two-man job. In our case, that job required a lot of wheezing, a little bleeding, and just the right amount of cursing. And because it…

It was three or four years ago, at a CEDIA Expo, that I first happened upon Advanced Dynamic Audio Monitors, aka ADAM Audio. What grabbed me was the array of imposingly high-tech speakers comprising their elite Tensor line. Sitting out in the middle of the floor of the Atlanta Convention Center, they not only looked more advanced than anything else around, they had the audacity to sound superb in a totally inappropriate acoustic situation. Despite the surrounding busyness of the Expo, I was able to sit down and actually enjoy the Beatles’ Love on DVDAudio. Clearly, these guys knew what they were doing. I vowed to follow up on it. ADAM’s ribbon drivers are based on Oskar Heil’s original Air Motion Transformer. The AMT was popular in the early 1970s,…

Digital Sources Sony XA-5400ES SACD/CD player, Oppo BDP-95 universal Blu-ray player. Preamplification Meridian HD621 HDMI audio processor & 861 Reference v6 digital surround controller, Bryston SP-3 surround processor. Power Amplifiers McIntosh MC303 (three-channel); Bel Canto Design REF1000 Mk.II, Anthem Statement M1 (both monoblocks). Loudspeakers Aerial Acoustics 7T, Bowers & Wilkins 800 Diamond. Cables Digital: Black Cat Veloce. Interconnect: van den Hul Flat 180 HDMI, AudioQuest Vodka HDMI & Cheetah/DBS balanced. Speaker: AudioQuest Mont Blanc/DBS biwire. AC: JPS Aluminata, AudioQuest NRG-10 & IEC>3US. Accessories APC S-15, Environmental Potentials EP-2450 power conditioners.…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the PSB Imagine Mini’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. With its 1/4" capsule, the Earthworks mike is small enough to not significantly affect the tuning of the port when used for a nearfield measurement. As expected from its small size, the Imagine Mini is not very sensitive, my estimate coming in at 85.5dB(B)/2.83V/m. This is a couple of dB lower than average, but within experimental error of the specified 85dB. The specification lists the impedance as 4 ohms and, as shown in fig.1, the magnitude does drop below 6 ohms for the entire midrange, reaching a minimum value of 3.15 ohms at 300Hz. The…

Description Floorstanding bass-reflex loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" silk-dome tweeter, two 5.25" blended-cone woofers with butyl surrounds, copper-clad pole-pieces, aluminum shorting rings, cast frames. Crossover frequency: 2.7kHz. Frequency response: 49Hz–22kHz, ±2.5dB. Sensitivity: 86dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 4 ohms. Dimensions (with base) 38.5" (990mm) H by 8.5" (220mm) W by 9.5" (245mm) D. Weight: 31 lbs (14.1kg). Finish Black Satin Lacquer. Serial numbers of units reviewed 0841142 010204, ’231. Price $559/pair. Approximate number of dealers: Sold direct. Manufacturer Emotiva Audio Corporation, 135 SE Parkway Court, Franklin, TN 37064. Tel: (877) 366-8324, (615) 790-6754. Fax: (615) 791-6287. www.emotiva.com…

A recent (unpublished) letter to the editor argued that the reference for audio perfection is the sound of real instruments in a real space. The writer claimed that, since the art and/or science of audio is advancing, and because it is a “scientific truth” that the closer you get to perfection, the less divergence there is in components, that therefore there should be less difference in sound among the components listed in Class A of Stereophile’s “Recommended Components” than among those in Class B, much less Class C. This should be true of loudspeakers, he said, but even more true of top-rated amplifiers, since “they inherently have less divergence.” Over the last few years I’ve reviewed a number of truly fine amplifiers, including the Musical Fidelity kW and Titan, the…

Analog Sources Continuum Audio Labs Caliburn turntable, Cobra tonearm, Castellon stand; Onedof turntable; Graham Engineering Phantom II, Kuzma 4Point tonearms; Lyra Atlas, Ortofon A90, Miyajima Labs Premium BE mono, Ice Blue cartridges. Preamplification Ypsilon VPS-100, Manley Labs Chinook phono preamplifiers; darTZeel NHB-18ns preamplifier. Digital Sources MSB Platinum Diamond DAC IV DAC, Platinum Studio ADC, Platinum Data CD IV CD transport; Simaudio Moon Evolution 650D DAC/CD transport; BPT-modified Alesis Masterlink hard-disk recorder; Meridian (Sooloos) Digital Media System, Pure Music software. Power Amplifier Music Reference RM200 Mk.II. Loudspeakers Wilson Audio Specialties MAXX 3. Cables Phono: Hovland/Graham Engineering MG2 Music Groove. Interconnect: darTZeel Zeel (50 ohms), Stealth Sakra & Indra, TARA Labs Zero Gold, ZenSati Seraphim. Speaker: Shunyata Research Anaconda, TARA Labs Omega Gold, ZenSati Seraphim. AC: Shunyata Research King Cobra Helix CX…

I measured the Halide DAC HD with Stereophile’s loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4); for some tests, I also used my vintage Audio Precision System One Dual Domain. I connected the Halide to one of the USB ports on my Intel MacBook; the Mac USB Prober utility reported the DAC HD as being the “Halide Design DAC HD” manufactured by “Halide Design,” and listed the serial number as “(C) 2010 Wavelength Audio, ltd.” The last refers to Gordon Rankin’s Streamlength proprietary asynchronous operating code for the TAS1020B USB receiver chip, and USB Prober confirmed that the DAC HD does indeed operate in the preferable isochronous asynchronous mode, with 24-bit word length and data sampled at 44.1,…

The great ragtime composer Scott Joplin had grander ambitions than just the magnificent miniatures for piano he’s famous for. When he died, in 1917, he had spent much of the previous 10 years polishing and campaigning for his full-length opera, Treemonisha, the piano-vocal score for which he had published in 1911. Joplin had studied classical composition and notation with a German scholar who had happened to settle in his hometown of Texarkana, Arkansas; lore has it that Julius Weiss gave young Joplin lessons in exchange for Mrs. Joplin’s services as a laundress. Treemonisha is through-composed, with sophisticated harmonies clearly influenced by European teachings, but it also incorporates early-jazz beats, proto-blues sounds, odd syncopations, occasional Victoriantype ballads, African-American folk and pop music, and moments that recall field hollers and revival meetings—in…

AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS GERMANY: MUNICH Paul Messenger Western economies might still be in the doldrums, but specialist hi-fi is alive and well and living in southern Germany. That was the strong impression I gained from a couple of days spent struggling to get ’round the High End Society’s High End 2012 show, held in Munich’s M.O.C. on May 3–6. It’s already Europe’s leading annual audio event, and the increasing strength of the high-end sector means that this show is becoming the most important gathering of hi-fi people on the international calendar, arguably more so than the annual Consumer Electronics Show, held each January in Las Vegas. Despite some off-site exhibitions in Munich hotels, High End continues to grow steadily, in numbers of both exhibitors and visitors. Nearly 15,000 people…

AnalogPlanet.com has gone live. Allan Toussaint should title an album. Elvis Costello should write a song. I’m running the website, and will continue to write this monthly column for Stereophile, as well as equipment reviews (though fewer of the latter). The new site also includes reviews of analog components originally published in Stereophile, and will shortly feature all 200-plus installments of “Analog Corner,” almost none of which has ever been available online. Let the hunt for contradictions begin! I’ve gotten letters that say, “You know, back in the April 1996 issue you wrote blah-blah-blah, but in April 2012 you wrote bleh-bleh-bleh, which is a complete contradiction. What gives?” My answer, as always, is “You tell me!” AnalogPlanet.com also incorporates more than a decade’s worth of content from my own website,…

Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The Fantasy Symphony Season competition, announced in this column in February, has been a smashing success—as far as I’m concerned, it’s the most worthwhile write-in competition yet. The 13 winning entries and one hors-concours laureate are posted in the follow-up to February’s column on Stereophile’s website (www.stereophile.com/content/fantasy-symphonycompetition-results-are). The update lists the compositions in each winning Fantasy Symphony Season entry. I created a spreadsheet to determine the most popular composers and works in the winning entries. During that process, I began to suspect that those entries were not randomly representative—there had been (as there should have been) a “selection bias” on my part. But to reveal that selection bias, I had…

Description Three-and-a-half-way, reflex-loaded tower loudspeaker. Driveunits: X-ART ribbon tweeter, X-ART ribbon midrange, two 7.5" (186mm) HexaCone woofers. Crossover frequencies: 150, 800, 2800Hz. Frequency range: 33Hz-50kHz. Nominal impedance: 4 ohms. Sensitivity: 90dB/W/m. Power handling: 200–300W. Dimensions 47.5" (1205mm) H by 9" (230mm) W by 12" (300mm) D. Weight: 70.5 lbs (32kg). Finishes Gloss Black, Cherry, Walnut. Serial Numbers of Units Reviewed H-06021, H-06022. Price $7000/pair. Approximate number of dealers: 12. Warranty: 10 years. Manufacturer ADAM Audio GmbH, Ederstrasse 16, D-12059 Berlin, Germany. Tel: (49) 30/86-30-097-0. Fax: (49) 30/86-30-097-7. US distributor: ADAM Audio USA Inc., 21 Tec Street, Hicksville, NY 11801. Tel: (516) 681-0690. Fax: (516) 977-1019. www.adam-audio.com.…

The first loudspeaker I heard from the Canadian company PSB was the Stratus, an affordably priced ($1400/pair), two-way tower with a soft-dome tweeter and an 8" woofer. The Stratus had benefited from designer Paul Barton’s being able to use the anechoic chamber at the Canadian government’s National Research Center, in Ottawa. The Stratus was reviewed for Stereophile by J. Gordon Holt in our May 1988 issue; he described the speaker as “eminently listenable,” though Gordon also felt that it was “a little lacking in guts and liveliness.” I had sat in on some of his listening sessions and had been impressed by what I heard. I subsequently met Barton at the 1988 Audio Engineering Society Convention in Los Angeles, and, in the first of many, many conversations we were to…

Analog Sources Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo power supply, Linn Ekos tonearm, Linn Arkiv B phono cartridge. Digital Sources Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP & DX-5 universal players; Apple 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini laptop running OS10.7, iTunes 10, Pure Music 1.86; Shuttle PC with Lynx AES16 soundcard & dual-core AMD Athlon processor running Windows 7, Foobar 2000, Adobe Audition 3.0; Halide DAC HD, Musical Fidelity V-DAC II, Benchmark DAC1, Logitech Transporter, Mark Levinson No.30.6 D/A converters; Ayre Acoustics QA-9 USB A/D converter; Empirical Audio Off-Ramp 4 USB-S/PDIF converter. Preamplification Liberty B2B-1 phono preamplifier, Classé CP-800 preamplifier. Power Amplifiers Classé CT-M600, Lamm M1.2 Reference (both monoblocks). Loudspeakers BBC LS3/5a, Emotiva XRT-5.2 X-Ref. Cables Digital: DH Labs Silver Sonic. AES/EBU: AudioQuest Coffee, Belkin Gold USB. FireWire: AudioQuest FireWire 400 (prototype). Interconnect (balanced): AudioQuest…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Emotiva XRT-5.2’s frequency response in the farfield; and an Earthworks QTC- 40, with its small, 1.4" capsule, for the nearfield responses. I left the grille off for the measurements. My estimate of the XRT-5.2’s voltage sensitivity was 87dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is typical of two-way designs. The Emotiva’s plot of impedance magnitude and electrical phase angle against frequency (fig.1) indicates that its impedance stays above 6 ohms for much of the midrange and treble, and that the magnitude is always high when the phase angle is extreme, mitigating its effect. Although there is a dip to 3.7 ohms at 4.3kHz, the Emotiva is not a difficult load for the partnering amplifier to drive. It’s not easy, in…

Description Solid-state monoblock power amplifier. Inputs: unbalanced voltagemode (RCA), unbalanced Zeel (BNC), balanced (XLR). Output power: 450W (26.5dBW) (850W peak) into 8 ohms, 800W (26dBW) (1700W peak) into 4 ohms, 1000W (24dBW) (1800W peak) into 2 ohms (software limited). Voltage gain (user selectable): 26 or 32dB into ohms. Input impedance: >30k ohms, 5Hz–200kHz (RCA); 50 ohms, ±1 ohm (Zeel); 10k ohms per phase (XLR). Output impedance: <0.28 ohm, 20Hz–20kHz (into 8 ohms). Frequency response: 0.7Hz–700kHz, +0/–3dB; 20Hz–20kHz, +0/–0.2dB. THD: <1%, 7Hz–77kHz. Signal/noise: >115dB, A-weighted, ref. nominal power. Dimensions 18" (460mm) H by 11" (277mm) W by 20" (511mm) D. Weight: 154 lbs (70kg). Serial number of units reviewed TZUA1458.538L/R. Price 135,000 Swiss Francs/pair ($144,500/pair at time of going to press). Approximate number of dealers: 9. Manufacturer darTZeel Audio SA High…

When it comes to getting audio from a PC via its USB port, the buzzword du jour is asynchronous. This cryptic term refers to which device has control over the timing of the audio data being streamed from the computer: the computer itself, or the device receiving the data. It might seem logical to have the computer control the timing, but this is not so. When digital audio data are converted to analog by a D/A converter, control over exactly when each dataword is converted is critical for the best quality of sound. Any uncertainty in that timing manifests itself as analog distortion, aka jitter. It is therefore good engineering practice to place the timing circuit, for obvious reasons referred to as a “clock,” as close as possible to the…

by ERICK LICHTE & JOHN ATKINSON It was high time I reviewed a turntable for Stereophile. One of the more intriguing and inexpensive ones I’ve seen lately is Clearaudio’s Concept, and after reading Michael Fremer’s review of the Concept in the June 2011 issue (http://www.stereophile.com/content/clearaudio-concept-record-player), I wanted to try one for myself. I also thought it might be nice for our readers to see what a raised-on-digital analog type (me) might think of Clearaudio’s entry-level system.1 The Concept ($1400 alone) is a turnkey analog rig that comes with platter, tonearm, and cartridge: a Concept MC moving-coil ($2000 total) or a Concept moving-magnet ($1500 total). The package arrives almost entirely preassembled, and adjusted for vertical tracking force (VTF), vertical tracking angle (VTA), and azimuth. All you have to do is take…

Ortofon Editor: With the recent rebirth of analog audio, the online marketplace of dealers and resellers is growing like mushrooms after the rain. We all understand principles of free trade in this country; however, Ortofon has concerns about its brand reputation and its customers, specifically concerning before- and after-sale service provided to them by unknown, offshore sellers. Authenticity and age of the product are hard to determine in these cases, and we have reasons to believe that a product offered for an unrealistically low price is not a genuine Ortofon product. Customers also run the risk of purchasing old-stock cartridges with dried-out suspensions, which will not even work. Low pricing is also a red flag of camouflaging sales of used cartridges under the guise of a new product description. As…