Innehållsförteckning för Nov-13 från Stereophile

The Death of an Audiophile Thanksgiving will mark two years since Charles died. I still miss him. I first met Charles in the 1990s, around the time I began to review recordings and audio equipment. I had just left my apartment and was driving slowly down the street when I spied a somewhat bent-over, wizened-looking man carrying a copy of Stereophile under his arm. My astonishment at discovering another Stereophile reader whom, it turned out, lived just two buildings away, brought my car to a sudden halt. I opened my window. “You read Stereophile?” I exclaimed. “Why, yes, I do,” replied Charles, with that curious mixture of intellectual engagement, hauteur, and combative distance that I was soon to know too well. So began our friendship. One of the many things…

ATTENTION ALLStereophile 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. ARIZONA ▪ Wednesday, November 27, 7pm: The Arizona Audio-Video Club will hold its Beautiful Sound of Analog event at Record High in Phoenix (4242 E. University Drive, Phoenix). For more info, visit www.azavclub.org, or contact Adam Goldfine at (602) 524-3974 or goldfineam@aol.com. CALIFORNIA ▪ Sunday, October 20, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Weinhart Design (2337 Roscomare Road, Los Angeles). Featured gear will include Harmonic Technology’s newest line of cables,…

The Kondo Attitude WWhenever I’m moved by an artist whose work I’ve never before heard or seen, my first impulse is to wonder: What else has this person done while I slumbered in ignorance? The same applies to those audio designers whose craft has approached the level of art. The products of Ken Shindo, Tim de Paravicini, Jean Constant Verdier, J.C. Morrison, Junji Kimura, Don Garber, Denis Morecroft, and a handful of others have all elicited that response—yet none more than the late Hiroyasu Kondo. His Audio Note Ongaku amplifier of 1989 woke the world to a number of possibilities: that a successful commercial amplifier could be designed to operate in single-ended mode; that it could be designed around new-old-stock (NOS) power tubes;1 that it could provide less than 30Wpc…

RA—The Book: The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design By Roger D’Arcy and Hugh Flynn (illustrator), with photographs by Neil Waving. Foreword by Adrian Kerridge. Black Box Limited (London), 2011. $215. Hardcover, 15" by 10.5" by 1.25", 350 pp. ISBN 978-1-907759-16-1. Available from www.rathebook.com (ships from within the US). In July 2004, I reviewed Jim Cogan and William Clark’s Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios, a collection of the business histories of 15 US recording studios (see www.ste reophile.com/features/704temples/index.html). Each chapter covered a particular studio, focusing on its role in the careers of the recording artists most associated with that studio; eg, United Western Recorders and the Beach Boys. Whereas Temples of Sound was more about the music business than about recording studios, RA—The Book: The Recording Architecture…

The Internet is full of people who claim that cables can’t make a difference in the sound, or that a coat hanger will do just fine, thanks, in place of expensive cables. Audio enthusiasts who accept that sort of nonsense at face value without taking the time to listen for themselves only limit their own listening pleasure. The wrong choice of cable, even one chosen from among the best, can destroy sonic satisfaction. End of rant. I began this review with TARA Labs’ Zero single-ended interconnect ($15,900/1m pair) and Omega Gold speaker cable, which have long been my references. For this review of the Constellation Performance Centaur Monos, TARA lent me a long length of their Zero balanced interconnect. Yes, the Zero is hideously priced—I’m not suggesting that it’s a…

What can you tell about the intrinsic sound quality of a loudspeaker if you’ve heard it only at an audio show? Arguably, not much. If it sounds bad, there may be a number of reasons for that, only one being the speaker itself. It may be the acoustics of the room, problems with speaker setup, poorly matched associated equipment, insufficient break-in/warm-up, or poor choice of demo recordings. Other conditions may not be conducive to the speaker revealing its potential, such as not being able to sit in the sweet spot, being distracted by people talking throughout the demo, etc. You might think that exhibitors would do their utmost to ensure that their products are presented in the most positive way possible, but, as Jason Victor Serinus pointed out in “There’s…

Dynamic Sounds Associates Phono II Editor: More than just customary thanks are due to Stereophile for publishing its review of our new phono preamplifier, the Phono II (October 2013). While we at Dynamic Sounds Associates (it’s true—I’m not really all alone on this project) plan to broaden our line in the coming years, the Phono II is our only product at this time. We also have the simplest form of distribution possible: we sell directly to audiophiles. Because of this, critics of Stereophile have suggested that we were too small a company to be considered, or that we had to pay for advertising before we could get a review. We are happy to acknowledge that these comments are unfounded. When Michael Fremer heard about us, he graciously offered us the…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR Matters of faith Editor: Just as there are “science-driven” know-nothings, there are also faith-driven ones. If you don’t have measurements of some double-blind testing, it’s faith (or maybe expectation) that drives what you think you hear. Subjectivists have turned audiophilia into a faith-based religion. Also, the name-calling by one of the magazine’s senior writers (“Analog Corner,” September 2013, p.27) is juvenile. —Harold Lay hlay37@hotmail.com Matters of proportion Editor: Was the photo of the Bowers & Wilkins 804 Diamond loudspeaker on the cover of the September issue purposefully altered to exaggerate the tweeter? If so, that’s pretty lame. If not, you owe B&W an apology, and all of your readers a new cover with a photo of the speaker in proper proportion. When I first saw this,…

I’m Back! Did you miss the Berlin Radio Show of August 1963? I did, too. That’s when Philips introduced the Compact Cassette, aka the audio cassette.1 The man who led the development team, Lou Ottens, is still very much alive at 87. The Compact Cassette caught on quickly for business and education. Journalism, too. On campus, language labs latched on to the high-quality cassette decks made, ever so briefly, by Wollensak, a US company then owned by 3M, who made audiotape. Few foresaw that the audio cassette might morph into a serious hi-fi format that would almost lick the LP. People used cassette machines to record concerts and bootleg tapes. Students recorded lectures. Teachers had the players read to their kids while they nattered among themselves. Hi-fi pioneer and populist…

New Acoustic Dimension In the mornings, just before I leave for work, I power up the system, turn the volume down low, and set the CD player to Repeat. I like to think that if I play calm, soothing music while Ms. Little and I are away, the cats will feel less alone and more relaxed. It’s also nice, on returning home from work, to walk into a room filled with music. One evening a few weeks ago, I stepped into the apartment, dropped my bags to the floor, settled down into the couch with my iPhone, and began scrolling through text messages. I’d been seated for only a moment before I had to turn my attention entirely to the sound of the system, which, even at a very low…

RECORD PLAYER ART DUDLEY Much ink has been spilled, and rightly so, on the topic of the LP’s recent and apparently durable resurrection as a playback medium. The corpse may not be quite as lively after death as before, but it is nonetheless arguably more Lazarus than Lavoisier (the latter having managed nothing more than to wink at the crowd following his time on the guillotine—as he boasted, in life, that he would do). I am no less set in my ways. After 15 years of owning and loving a Linn LP12 turntable, and thereafter hearing the unsubtle improvement in musical drive and force offered by such vintage players as the Thorens TD 124 and the Garrard 301, I switched to the latter, a crime for which I am still…

LOUDSPEAKER KALMAN RUBINSON Sonus Faber is an iconic Italian high-end company whose loudspeakers have always evinced innovative technical design, superb construction, spectacular appearance, and great sound. I was intrigued with the design and performance of their stand-mounted Extrema (reviewed by Martin Colloms in the June 1992 Stereophile, Vol.15 No.6; see www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/915/index.html), which combined a proprietary soft-dome tweeter and a mineral-loaded polypropylene-cone woofer with an electrodynamically damped but passive KEF B139 driver that occupied the entire rear panel. I was fascinated by their Homage models, named for the Cremona violin makers Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari; these had, in lieu of a fabric grille, a curtain of heavy rubber strings that was striking in appearance, and allowed me to better appreciate their drivers and curve-sided cabinets, the latter evoking the great instruments…

THIS ISSUE: An intriguing Italian loudspeaker spends some quality time in JA’s test lab, and Larry Greenhill returns to one of the finest FM tuners ever. Now 25 years old, the DaySequerra FM Reference is the only analog FM tuner—other than the Marantz 10B, Sequerra Model 1, and 1986 DaySequerra (DS) Broadcast Monitor FM—to ever offer oscilloscope tuning. This Follow-Up reports on a new upgrade that finally addresses the tuner’s tendency to wear out its cathode-ray tube (CRT). In my June 1989 review of the original FM Reference (FMR) (Stereophile, Vol.12 No.6), I reported surprisingly good midrange transparency and bass punch from its IF and audio sections when compared to directly accessed source material via bypass test. Since then, DaySequerra has offered two upgrades: the Classic upgrade ($1040), in 1998,…

Countrier Than Thou When we last saw Robbie Fulks, he was grinning maniacally on the pulpy cover of his 2007 live album, Revenge!, which has the subtitle Applause Was Not Enough . . . He Would Make Them All PAY! and a number of bold words: “Sweet! Cheap! Live!” The album’s opening number, “We’re on the Road,” is interrupted about halfway through by a fantasy telephone call from the head of Fulks’s then label, Yep Roc, telling him to deliver a new album fast and cheap because the last one didn’t sell. It was a classic Fulks touch. In the admittedly small world of alternative country music, singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks has always been the smartest kid in the room—as well as the one with the perpetual smirk on his face.…

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO John Atkinson It saddens me to write that Debbie Starr, Stereophile’s managing editor from March 1996 through March 2000, died Sunday, August 25, at her sister Ellen’s house, near San Diego, after a brief fight with cancer. Debbie did much to make the magazine what it is today; she even wrote all the new text that we published in the April and October 1999 and April 2000 editions of “Recommended Components.” Perhaps because she wasn’t distracted by being an audiophile, she excelled at extracting the meat of an equipment review in the fewest words. Music did play an important role in Debbie’s life—the Austin Lounge Lizards were her favorite band—but her first love was plants and gardens. Before joining Stereophile, she had been the executive editor…

Rega’s RP8 turntable aims for mass extinction Rega Research sold more turntables last year than in any of its previous 40-odd years of business, and is on target to do so again this year. How many turntables is that? I know but can’t yet say. Rega, along with most major makers of audiophile turntables, is participating in an ongoing project I’ve undertaken that I hope will reveal the true depth of the vinyl resurgence by counting the production of turntables, cartridges, and vinyl records industry-wide. So far, on the hardware side, only the purveyors of plastic turntables have balked. And while those sales numbers are high (probably higher than all of the audiophile manufacturers’ sales combined), the aggregated numbers so far reported are impressive, and beyond my most optimistic imaginings.…

Make it simple . . . Ah, for the old mono days. I remember assembling my first audio systems in my early teens and as a novice—things were easy. My first amp had four RCA input jacks, each clearly labeled and corresponding to an identically labeled setting on the input selector switch. There were screw-down speaker connectors for 4, 8, and 16 ohms, and ground. Tape output was defaulted to whatever input I was listening to. The amp had but four knobs: Input Selection, Volume, Bass, and Treble. And although it would seem almost impossible to go wrong, I did exercise focus and care as I tended to my first setup. Then came stereo, which simply doubled everything, followed by a shift to a separate preamplifier and power amp, and…

MICHAEL FREMER MONOBLOCK POWER AMPLIFIER High-performance audio has always been and will probably remain a cottage industry perpetuated by talented and visionary individuals whose products reflect their singular visions and whose companies often bear their names, though of course there are notable exceptions. One of them is Constellation Audio. No single star dominates the appropriately named Constellation Audio, which arrived on the scene at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show with a seemingly impossible debut roster of products: stereo and monoblock amplifiers, preamplifiers, digital file player/DACs, and phono preamplifiers, each category of component represented by members of two distinct lines: no compromise and some compromise. Constellation’s instigators-in-chief are David Payes and Murali Murugasu, the Australian duo whose first venture into high-performance audio manufacturing was Continuum Audio Labs, makers of the Caliburn…

LOUDSPEAKER ROBERT J. REINA Iwas introduced to audiophilia by my friend Gary Gustavsen. Although I’d known Gary since I was 13, I didn’t discover his passion for music until that day in high school physics lab when I blurted out an obscure line from the Doors’ “The Soft Parade,” and Gary bounced back immediately with the next line. It turns out I shared my friend’s passions for the Doors and Frank Zappa, but not for Mahler. Before long, Gary was dragging me to every audio store in our area to listen to potential speakers for his first high-end audio system. At the beginning of each trip he’d say, “Right now I’m partial to the Rectilinear 3s.” Although I heard him say that many times, I never actually got to hear…

It wasn’t until I’d read Michael Metzger’s write-up of Self Portrait in “Records To Die For” (Stereophile, February 2002) that I was prompted to revisit Bob Dylan’s once-critically-scoffed-at musical enigma from 1970. Sandwiched between the new country of 1969’s Nashville Skyline and the decidedly folkier New Morning from late 1970, the two LPs of the original Self Portrait sounded like the work of an artist, albeit one still in his late 20s, wanting to unplug from the world and his already staggering body of work. With its quirky cover versions and unfocused song selection, it left plenty of fans scratching their heads. But as Metzger suggested, Self Portrait has aged well; once underappreciated, it is now revered. Columbia/Legacy’s stellar Bootleg Series of Dylan recordings—live and in-studio, and now numbering in…