Innehållsförteckning för Oct-13 från Stereophile

The Pursuit of Audio Excellence THIS ISSUE: One listener describes his audiophile odyssey. At the time of my August 2011 “As We See It” (see www.stereophile.com/content/i-am-audiophile), I was using a Wilson-McIntosh system. That system is still with me and still gets quite a bit of use. Its location, however, has changed. In its place is a system that I can’t see switching out or needing to replace: Wilson Alexandria XLF speakers with VTL Siegfried Series II Reference monoblock power amps, TL-7.5 Series III Reference preamplifier, and TP-6.5 Signature phono stage. This system has taken my listening sessions to an entirely different level. Over the many hours I have spent sitting in front of it, I have been trying to articulate what that means. I think that when one climbs to…

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, September 15, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Audio High (605 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles). Audio High’s David Fallica will demonstrate the new, Mark Levinson–designed Daniel Hertz M1 loudspeaker system; and Joe Kubala, president of Kubala-Sosna, will demonstrate his loudspeaker cables. Eastwind Import will be on hand to sell LPs and CDs, a raffle is planned,…

THIS ISSUE: Art Dudley tries but fails to come to grips with a decidedly off-the-wall tonearm design. Whether the subject is hi-fi equipment, films, restaurants, power tools, or condoms (see the April 2005 “Listening,” www.stereophile.com/content/listening-28-0), reviewing should be off-limits to the perennially unhappy. I’m reminded of that dictum by the flap over the recent film Identity Thief, which was savaged by reviewer Rex Reed—not because the film is weak, but because its star, Melissa McCarthy, is heavy. Reed, whose career as the Paul Lynde of film reviewing was punctuated by a starring role in a flop called Myra Breckenridge, mentioned in his review McCarthy’s size not once but numerous times, thus exposing himself as a bullying hack who wields his harshest criticisms not when they are merited but as unconscious…

EDITORS’ TOP PICKS FOR OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD GEAR Looking to upgrade your system? Expand your audio horizons? Stereophile editors rate 500+ top audio products, loudspeakers turntables amplifiers digital players headphones music servers cables Components listed here have been formally reviewed in Stereophile and have been found to be among the best available in each of four or five quality classes. Whether a component is listed in Class A or Class E, we highly recommend its purchase. Each listing—in alphabetical order within classes—is followed by a brief description of the product’s sonic characteristics and a code indicating the Stereophile Volume and Issue in which that product’s report appeared. Thus the September 2012 issue is indicated as “Vol.35 No.9.” Some products listed have not yet been reported on; these are marked (NR), for “Not…

The older an audiophile becomes, the faster time flies. Has it really been 60 years since Saul Marantz founded the company that bears his name? Has it really been almost 50 years since that company was acquired by the Tushinsky brothers and Superscope? Has it really been 33 years since Superscope sold Marantz to Philips, just in time for the launch of CD? Has it really been 13 years since Marantz Japan acquired the brand’s assets and, a year later, merged with Denon to form D&M Holdings? And more significant in the context of this review, has it really been almost 35 years since Ken Ishiwata moved from Japan to Belgium to act as Marantz’s European technical director and, now, “Brand Ambassador”? Ishiwata has been based in Belgium ever since.…

Now entering its fourth decade, the Compact Disc player seems to have reached a stage of maturity where the best models within a given price range will sound pretty much alike. The technology of the Compact Disc itself is set, its possibilities and limitations are well understood; and the designers of CD players who figure out how to stretch the former and finesse the latter wind up at about the same sonic place (again, for the same price), even if they’ve taken different routes to get there. What distinguishes these players in the marketplace tends to be not so much their sound quality as their features, and the world of digital audio has expanded in ways that make features very important—some of them, anyway. And so we have the Audio…

I was surprised when Bryston, manufacturers of the BDP-1 digital player ($2195), released a new version, the BDP-2 ($2995), a scant 21 months after I’d reviewed the BDP-1 in the June 2011 Stereophile.2 This jolted me—I’d purchased the review sample of the BDP-1 to use as my reference source for playing high-resolution digital files. Having my new reference player superseded less than two years after its purchase reminded me how fast computers become obsolete, compared to audiophile amplifiers and preamplifiers. Both BDPs are basically computers running the Linux operating system and dedicated to streaming audio files with sample rates of up to 192kHz. The purpose of this update is to describe the differences between the BDP-2 and its predecessor. Why did Bryston decide to upgrade the original so soon after…

THIS ISSUE: Don’t fret if your baby acts funny; Freud can explain it.—a paraphrase of Dr. Benjamin Spock "Hey, it wouldn’t be the music business if something didn’t go wrong, right?” So said Lindsay Brandt, the manager of Deer Tick, who’d invited me over to the offices of Partisan Records, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to have lunch and hear a test pressing of their new album, Negativity. Sensing an audiophile in the house, not to mention a rising band eager to hear their new record on vinyl for the first time, the gear turned fussy. Speakers belched colicky static. Amplifier channels suddenly wanted their binky. Cables pouted, turntables squabbled, and a CD player refused to eat its peas. Andy Hsueh, the staffer charged with running this solid-state nursery, was in apologetic…

TAKE HEED! Unless marked otherwise, all letters to the magazine and its writers are assumed to be for possible publication. In the spirit of vigorous debate implied by the First Amendment, and unless we are requested not to, we publish correspondents’ e-mail addresses. The tragedy of the commons Editor: Regarding John Atkinson’s “As We See It” essay in July, where he wrote, “To survive, audio retailers need to be farmers, not fishermen,” it’s hard to be a farmer when the fishermen continuously eat your crop the minute the sprouts break the surface of the soil. We need to help our retailers stay in business. If we allow the fishermen to fish the oceans to extinction, the farmers will not be able to grow enough to feed us. Thank goodness crème…

Blue, Blue, His Teeth Are Blue THIS ISSUE: Sam compares CDs with Bluetooth audio using Musical Fidelity’s M1SDAC and M1CDT. But first, how I spent my summer vacation. Maksim is always underfoot. Our cat is always getting tripped over or stepped on. I had long thought that, someday, Maksim would bring me to my knees. Instead, I did it to myself. Preparing dinner shoeless, I tripped over the sock dangling loosely from my left foot. I collapsed to the floor, my ankle broken in two places. Five days in the hospital, followed by nearly two months in a nursing home. Bingo, anyone? HodgePodge? Jokes galore? Jeopardy? Wheel of Fortune? Between sessions of physical therapy, I fled to a leafy courtyard with my iPhone and B&W P3 “mobile headphones.” I saved…

THIS ISSUE: SM returns to Wharfedale’s Diamond 10.1 loudspeaker, tries out NAD’s C 516BEE CD player, and explores AudioQuest’s affordable Bridges & Falls interconnects. Last month, I’d intended to compare the overachieving Pioneer SP-BS22-LR stand-mounted loudspeaker ($129.99/pair) with the Wharfedale Diamond 10.1 ($349/pair). In fact, I was deep into the process—surrounded by pages and pages of scribbled notes, thumbs swollen and sticky with Blu-Tack—when it occurred to me that something was wrong with the Wharfedales. When I noticed the problem, I wasn’t really paying attention to the music. I wasn’t even sitting in the sweet spot—a fact that I find slightly annoying and, even more, disturbing. Maybe all critical listening should be done in the bathroom. In this case, I was sitting with my back turned to the system, at…

As anyone who’s ever been there can attest, the laws of nature don’t apply in New Orleans—so seldom, in fact, that musical lightning, or at least thunder, has now struck there more than once. Many years ago, probably in the Colored Waifs Home at 301 City Park Avenue, near Conti Street, a unique triple threat emerged. He could sing, play trumpet, and was a natural entertainer. And yet, while there will never be another Louis Armstrong, another young horn player who sings, and is an increasingly confident front man, has now arisen from the Crescent City. That parallel gives Troy Andrews, better known as Trombone Shorty, what Pops often called the heebie-jeebies. “Whooo, I think I just got the chills just now. It’s scary just being mentioned with him,” Andrews…

The name sounds perfect. It fits neatly next to those of Messrs. Leak, Sugden, Walker, Grant, Lumley, and others of Britain’s most rightly revered amplifier builders. In fact, when their distributor called and asked if I’d like to review the latest amplifier from Croft Acoustics, I accepted without actually knowing who they are, simply because they sounded like someone I was supposed to know—someone who’s been around for 60 years or so, shellacking bell wire in an old mill with a thatched roof. As it turns out, this British company has been in business just 30 years—itself no small feat in perfectionist audio—and founder Glenn Croft actually doesn’t spend his days winding transformers. Although Croft’s first commercial product was, indeed, a tubed amplifier, he has dedicated the past few years…

LOUDSPEAKER In a recent email, a reader, having read my review of the Monitor Audio Silver RX6 loudspeaker in the June 2012 issue, said that he’d like to see it compared with the similarly priced Wharfedale Diamond 10.7 ($1299/pair) and Epos Elan 10 ($1000/pair). That sounded interesting. The floorstanding 10.7 is the flagship model of Wharfedale’s Diamond series, six models up from the Diamond 10.1 bookshelf (which I reviewed in July 2011) and featuring the same dome tweeter. And the Epos Elan 10 essentially replaces the Epos M5i, which I reviewed in February 2011, and which has served as my reference bookshelf speaker ever since. I requested samples of both. (My review of the Epos Elan 10 is scheduled to appear in the January 2014 issue.) Design The three-way Diamond…

The most indelicate, if not gory, term in all of music is the ever-popular “bleeding chunks.” The bane of classical audiences cursed with lazy pops conductors, bleeding chunks are movements of works—or even parts of movements—strung together in that abomination known as a medley. The effect can be, I guess, soothing to those who, for example, know only a little about Mozart. But for anyone well versed in their Wolfy, these programs are jarring, and can produce involuntarily grinding of those cavity-prone back molars. But, like many things musical, what is fundamentally icky in the wrong hands can, in the right hands, become art of exceptional, original beauty, a breathtaking achievement—like Selected Signs. Intended to serve as mini-soundtracks for the rooms of the exhibition ECM: A Cultural Archeology, which ran…

SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should e-mail the when, where, and who to stephen. mejias@sorc.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the December 2013 issue is September 27, 2013. USA: NEW YORK John Atkinson Stereophile’s owner, Source Interlink Media (SIM), announced last May that it had acquired Sound+Vision magazine from Bonnier Corporation. S&V was formed in 2000 when its then owner, Hachette Filipacchi, merged Stereo Review, Video, and Audio magazines. Stereo Review was first published in 1958 by Ziff-Davis as HiFi and Music Review. It was renamed HiFi/Stereo Review in 1961, then plain Stereo Review in 1968, and absorbed High Fidelity magazine in 1989 (see http://tinyurl.com/lkht2lq). On July 22, SIM announced that it was merging Sound & Vision with Stereophile’s…

THIS ISSUE: Mikey on the DSA Phono II preamplifier and moving-coil cartridges from Miyajima Labs and Stein Music. Shortly after the July 2013 issue of Stereophile hit the newsstands, I received an e-mail from audio restoration expert Doug Pomeroy, who specializes in the digital preservation of disc pressing metal parts, acetates, and 78s. (For an example of his excellent work, see www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/arts/music/17jazz.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.) I first spoke with Pomeroy in 2001, for a story about digital audio published in a Village Voice music supplement. His and my opinions about digital sound couldn’t be more divergent. Pomeroy’s experience dwarfs mine, but I haven’t budged from my opinions about digital in the 12 years since. I’ll give you a quick example why: I just played 24-bit/96kHz files of Tom Waits’s Bad As Me on…

THIS ISSUE: Ayre’s power-line filter, tackling a nuts-and-bolts system housecleaning, and two terrific new recordings. Long experience has convinced me that many audiophiles’ stereo systems substantially underperform compared to what they could sound like. This is not because people haven’t spent enough money on their electronics or speakers. Instead, people aren’t getting all the performance they’ve paid for because they haven’t devoted enough attention to all aspects of the initial setup, and/or to maintenance and updating. Reduced to its essentials, a stereo system is a machine designed to convert the electricity that comes out of your wall outlet into mechanical motion by the loudspeakers, which create the sound in your listening room. So we should start with the wall current. Ayre Acoustics L-5xe line filter Line filters, power conditioners, or…

The world is catching up with Darcy James Argue. Two years ago, he was known mainly for having the strangest name in jazz since Ornette Coleman. Now he’s a double winner in Downbeat’s 2013 Critics’ Poll—the top pick for Best Arranger, and tied with Maria Schneider for Best Big Band Leader. By no stretch is Argue “rich and famous.” This is jazz, after all. But he’s making it within the realm of his choosing, and the band he created—in its vibe and its music—has crossover potential. His 18-piece ensemble, which he calls Secret Society, isn’t your granddad’s big band. The liner notes of his first album, Infernal Machines (2009), are set in the typeface of a Victorian political pamphlet and state that the sessions were “recorded ’twixt the 15th and…

Tubes? In a CD player? Century-old technology embedded in a modern digital design? I realize that Aesthetix’s Saturn Romulus is not the first disc player or D/A processor with tubes, nor will it be the last—but does combining these technologies even make sense? Are audiophiles working at cross purposes to them-selves, looking for modern perfection but preferring a little old-school sweetening here and there? To date, I’ve stuck with purely solid-state DACs and disc players, but I was curious enough to jump at a chance to audition the Aesthetix Romulus DAC/CD player and get my ears on this oddest of technological hybrids. The Saturn Romulus is named after one of the mythical founders of Rome (Star Trek fans will recall Romulus as the namesake planet of the Romulans), and is…

Croft Phono Integrated integrated amplifier As I write these words, I haven’t yet read Art Dudley’s complete review (elsewhere in this issue) of the new Croft integrated amplifier.1 I do know, however, that Art liked it a lot and that it performed very poorly on John Atkinson’s test bench. It’s not the first time we’ve experienced such a discrepancy, and it won’t be the last. In this case, though, the results diverged so thoroughly that JA asked for a second opinion. Perhaps because I happened to be in his direct line of vision, JA offered the assignment to me. (I tried to duck. I failed.) He said something about lots of third-harmonic distortion—1.2% of the stuff, even at low volumes into 4 ohms, which should be easily audible on pure…

Lamm ML-3 Signature Most classical concerts cultivate an inner experience—emotion without motion. Editor: In their post-review comments, manufacturers usually thank the reviewer, agree or disagree with his conclusions, and often discuss various technical aspects of the product under review. However, to my utter surprise, Michael Fremer’s review of the ML-3 Signature [September 2013] stirred an unexpected reaction in me that prompts an altogether different kind of response. That’s because I’d read the entire review in one breath—much akin to being immersed in a great concert performance turned in by a spectacular, all-star group of musicians. And just as happens in a concert hall, following moments of silence after the last chord dies down and the audience explodes in a great roar of applause and bravos, so was I tempted to…