Innehållsförteckning för May-14 från Stereophile

THIS ISSUE: The one-size-fits-all-music loudspeaker has yet to be designed. New Sensations Here’s what I’ve learned in my 35 years in the High End, first as a hi-fi salesman and then as a full-time reviewer and blogger: No hi-fi, no matter how expensive or exalted, will ever deliver the holy grail. While there have been considerable advances over the years, I can cite two 50+-year-old loudspeakers—Quad ESL electrostatics and Klipsch’s big horns—whose transparency and dynamic range, respectively, blow away those of many contemporary high-end speakers. The very best of today’s speakers, electronics, and source components don’t zero in on a single perfected sound indistinguishable from the experience of being in the same room as the musicians—no, every one of them sounds different from all the rest. I want to experience…

THIS ISSUE: Sam catches up with Croft, KEF, and Dayton Audio’s Sola Bluetooth speaker. Don’t brush Bluetooth aside! Procter & Gamble is about to introduce the Oral-B SmartSeries electric toothbrushes. They will connect, via Bluetooth, with a smartphone app to help you brush the teeth that most need brushing. The app will monitor your brushing progress in real time and nudge you when it’s time to move on. Expect it to go for around $250—about the cost of filling two cavities. Expect to spend two minutes brushing with your Bluetoothbrush. More Bluetooth devices are arriving left and right, including Bluetooth audio receivers and speakers—like the Dayton Audio Sola wireless speaker, to which I’m listening in my office as I type. Meanwhile, let’s catch up with Croft and KEF. Croft Phono…

THIS ISSUE: SM gets back to vinyl. Into the Groove What I failed to make absolutely clear in my April column is that I really, truly, thoroughly enjoyed all three USB DAC–headphone amps that I auditioned: the Audioengine D3 ($189), the AudioQuest DragonFly v1.2 ($149), and the Cambridge Audio DacMagic XS ($199). Each offered a slightly different perspective on the music, but none could be accused of closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge, dumping several feet of snow on top of our car, or doing anything especially wrong. They committed no crimes, told no lies. If I had to choose a favorite, I’d choose the DragonFly—not only for its sound, which remains excellent, but also for its look, feel, low price, and because it’s made in the US. Sound…

Making a recording is always a personal journey—everyone has a story to tell. Jazz violinist Regina Carter’s latest, Southern Comfort, is an eloquent musical expression of Carter tracing the roots of her paternal lineage back five generations. For the project’s sound engineer, Joe Ferla, it’s the final project of a engineering career, and the beginning point of his new life as a practicing musician. The entwining of these journeys gives the album’s music and sound a rare honesty. Released by Sony Masterworks, Southern Comfort began as a Web addiction. “I got hooked on this Ancestry.com site, and there’s a DNA test, and I started reading, and I thought, ‘You know what, let me delve into this and see if I can get any further.’ I know more information about my…

“Physical discs are so 20th century,” I wrote back in 2006, when I began experimenting with using, in my high-end rig, a computer as a legitimate source of music. These days I rarely pop a disc into my Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP disc player, unless it’s an SACD I want to hear, or a CD I haven’t yet ripped into my library. But many audiophiles, even if attracted to the idea of using a file-based system as a primary music source, do not want a computer in their listening rooms. Nor do they want to be bothered by the fact that a computer demands too intimate a relationship with its user. For such folks, a number of high-end audio companies now offer turnkey, one-box solutions. Larry Greenhill has written about Bryston’s…

I used Stereophile’s loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It” and www.ap.com) to measure the Raven Spirit 300B Reference Stereo. I installed the tubes using the revised guide that had been sent to Art Dudley; the output tubes were the pairs of Sophia Electric Royal Princess 300Bs he’d used in his auditioning. As the XLR jacks are connected with pin 2 in parallel with the RCA jacks, I performed all measurements using RCA cables to connect the amplifier to the Audio Precision, and ran the amplifier driving 1kHz at 1Wpc into 8 ohms for two hours before examining its performance. The needles on the front-panel meters were at 1:00 at this power level. The Raven Spirit preserved absolute polarity from…

WANTED: Jazz Hero. Must be willing and able to bring stunning new creative energies to a musical genre in danger of becoming stale and repetitive. Must be comfortable with a Marsalis level of celebrity. Saxophone or trumpet players preferred. Old men need not apply. In 2011, jazz prayers were answered with the release of When the Heart Emerges Glistening, a brilliantly inventive mainstream jazz album led by Ambrose Akinmusire, a photogenic, 28-year-old trumpeter from Oakland, California. The young man had lots of fresh ideas, speed and dexterity to burn, and a unique tone, the combination of which brought back a flood of memories: Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Pops. Akinmusire’s pedigree is equally compelling. Recruited after high school by alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, Akinmusire toured Europe with Coleman’s Five Elements band…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR Tasteless but funny Editor: Even Hitler had an opinion on audio cables: www.youtube.com/watch?v= 3UQDTZcpsDE. —John Mayberry emmaco@emmaco.com Filling a need Editor: Stereophile is a publication devoted to informing its readers of the ever-changing world of audio playback. It accomplishes this task by employing a number of reviewer writers with a range of interests and cultural backgrounds. Sam Tellig is now teaching us about the value of Internet radio, whereas a while back he was trying out new DACs to improve the sound of his CDs. Stephen Mejias has a thing about cables, but are expensive interconnects really necessary if the interconnect is very short? I’ll never forget Stephen’s story about how his girlfriends went to a party where he was the DJ: very charming. And all…

THIS ISSUE: Mikey reflects on how LP grooves are cut and sets up VPI’s new direct-drive turntable. VPI Does Direct Drive From the perspective of today’s complex, high-tech world, a turntable seems to be a relatively simple, almost primitive device that uses 19th-century technology to make a platter rotate on a bearing at a specific speed. From afar, a spinning platter is a spinning platter, and if a tonearm and cartridge can travel without a hiccup from lead-in to lead-out groove, well, mission accomplished. But if it’s that simple, why do all turntables sound different from one another? Can we all agree that they do? That we don’t need to “prove” this with double-blind A/B/X testing? Good. Then I’ll proceed. Although you can get sound from an LP by rotating…

THIS ISSUE: Kal reports on the Dirac Research Live Room Correction Suite and Krell’s Foundation preamplifier-processor. Dirac and Krell in Multichannel I’m sure that the larger manufacturers were displaying new audio/video receivers and preamplifierprocessors at the Las Vegas Convention Center last January, during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show—but except for dinner, I didn’t get out of the Mirage, where I slept, or the Venetian Tower Suites, where the high-end audio displays were concentrated. Still, there were new developments to report; see Stereophile’s almost live online coverage at www.stereophile.com/category/ces-2014. Most interesting was the demonstration of a new approach to room equalization, presented by the canny folks from Dirac Research. Using a 7.2-channel system, Dirac demonstrated their Active Room Correction system, in which each speaker is also used as an active compensation…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: High-end audio is the tail of the dog that is the consumer audio business. We have little leverage in determining where the technology is going, even though we undoubtedly know more about it than the average buyer. On the other hand, after the mainstream has determined where it’s going (or thinks it’s going), the high-end business must accept that, and try to optimize it for those of us who care deeply about getting the best sound. The ubiquitous iPod and its fellow MP3 players kicked off the playing of music files and allowed listeners to carry around their music wherever they went. It’s now hard to find anyplace where there aren’t people with wires hanging from their ears, and it’s difficult…

As the NAD M50 has only digital outputs, the most important thing to measure is the quality of those outputs. Using Stereophile’s loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It” and www.ap.com), I connected the M50’s AES/EBU output, which I’d used for all of my listening, to one of its AES/EBU inputs using a 45’ length of Apogee 110 ohm balanced cable. The SYS2722’s input impedance was set to 110 ohms; the NAD’s AES/EBU output impedance was close to this at 125 ohms. Playing 24-bit files, all 24 bits were active in the M50’s digital output. With 44.1kHz data, the actual rate of the data was superbly close, at 44,099Hz; even with 176.4kHz data, the actual rate was within 3Hz of…

Big tube amplifiers were once scary monsters reserved for those who didn’t mind heavy maintenance, careful tweaking, and the occasional explosion. Blown tubes required replacing, preferably with pricey matched pairs, then biasing with a voltmeter. Optimal sonic performance required regular bias monitoring and adjusting, and because of current surges on startup, you had to choose between leaving the heat-producing monoliths on, or turning them on and off for each listening session, thus shortening the life of the tubes. For all of those reasons, the received wisdom was that tube amps should have no more than two push-pull pairs of output tubes per channel. Nevertheless, in the mid-1990s, some designers soldiered on. Audio Research came out with its 16-output-tube 600 Reference, and VTL had its 24-tube MB-1250 Wotan, 1 both monoblocks.…

Bob’s Devices CineMag Sky 30 MC Editor: My thanks to Art Dudley for taking the time to review the Bob’s Devices Sky 30 MC step-up transformer. Its design is based on the CineMag 1131, which Art reviewed in the May 2012 edition of Stereophile. The Sky 30 is intended to fill the needs of cartridges with an output between 0.16 and 0.6mV and retain the CineMag 1131’s qualities. Mr. Dudley used an EMT OFD 25, which has an output of 1.15mV, which is well outside the range intended for the Sky 30. Thus, the impedance match was not within the engineered range. He did not say whether he used the Low setting (1:15) or the High setting (1:30), which affects both the impedance reflected back to the cartridge as well…

AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS UK: THE AUDIO MARKET Paul Messenger Clarity Alliance, the UK’s trade organization that brings together manufacturers and British specialist hi-fi retailers, held its annual formal get-together in the spring. As usual, the weather was disgusting (this year mild, but very wet), but the trip was, also as usual, worthwhile—perhaps more for the ancillary presentations than for the industry politics. Nick Simon and Lucy Twist, from the market-research organization GfK, provided a useful statistical overview of the UK and European marketplaces. The first piece of good news is that general consumer confidence is improving along with the general economic situation, as fear of unemployment recedes. However, that improvement is not yet reflected in the consumer-electronics sector: 2013 showed a 9% decline in sales value compared with 2012.…

THIS ISSUE: Art steps up the signal from his movingcoil phono cartridge with two very different devices. Religion in Reverse Except for a few titles I’ve combined with the ones in my listening room, and a few others that I intend to sell, the record collection I bought last year remains in three rows of boxes on the floor of our guest room. Because that room is spacious and comfortable, and equipped with a small refrigerator and a flat-screen TV, it is also the place where my 16-year-old daughter and her friends have their slumber parties and Dr. Who marathons. Thus, as you can imagine, I must sometimes explain to our young guests the Tao of collecting records. It’s like explaining religion in reverse: “These thousands of LPs—the ones that…

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch (New York: Harper, 2013) 365pp. Hardcover, $27.99. A section of this biography, which documents the early life of the dazzling bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker, starts with a four-page meditation on “the truth and myth of railroads” in America: the figurative underground railroad that comprised a web of escape routes for slaves fleeing the South; the “black-smokepuffing iron horse” that galloped into the West and “would eventually carry the brutal and legendary Apache chief Geronimo and his people... to Florida”; the trains “that inspired the legend of Casey Jones”; and the trains steaming through the blues tunes that echoed their melancholy nocturnal sounds. Crouch views the train as “a vehicle and a dream source” in a culture where…

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,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4) to examine the Sony HAP-Z1ES’s measured behavior. Initially I tried playing the WAV files of my test signals from a FAT32-formatted USB flash drive, but the Sony didn’t recognize the drive’s format. (It did recognize that a drive had been inserted and asked me if I wanted it formatted.) I then hooked up the Sony to my home network via Ethernet and transferred the WAV files from my Apple MacBook Pro using Sony’s HAP Music Transfer app. This worked flawlessly, and for the measurements I played the files from the Sony’s internal hard drive using the frontpanel controls. While the Sony will play DSD64 and DSD128 files,…

No one can say precisely how or when the ancient 300B triode tube made its cross-kingdom leap to the modern world of consumer audio, but we’ve got the where pretty much nailed down: It all began in Asia, where the best of the West is sometimes held in reverence rather than left to drown in consumerism’s wake. Asia is the final resting place for the great Western Electric cinema systems of the 1940s—and that’s where the 300B earned its un-American second act. By the mid-1990s, the tube had captured the hearts of hobbyists who, consciously or not, sensed that the audio refineries of the day had lost the plot, not to mention the body. And then this primitive tube, this plaything of fevered crazies who would drag us all back…

VTL’s Siegfried Series II Reference has both balanced and single-ended inputs and can be operated in tetrode or triode output-stage modes, each with four levels of negative feedback. Because fully characterizing its performance in every one of the 16 possible conditions would be very time consuming, I performed a limited set of measurements in all 16, and then a more complete set using the balanced input and in both triode and tetrode modes, each with minimum and maximum feedback—which VTL respectively calls Low Damping Factor (LDF) and Max Damping Factor (MDF). I used Stereophile’s loan sample of the top-ofthe-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/108awsi/index.html). The Siegfried II’s balanced and unbalanced inputs both preserved absolute polarity (ie, were non-inverting) with the…

What’s It All About… “Alfie” on an ECM album? Burt Bacharach meets Manfred Eicher via an Italian drummer, a Norwegian bass player, and a Scottish saxophonist? Is this a joke? When I ask, via Skype, about the pop tune’s appearance on Mira—Arild Andersen’s new ballads record, to which the word muscular applies—the jazz bassist laughs. “When I started at ECM, I never thought I would record ‘Alfie,’ by Burt Bacharach,” he says from Oslo. Andersen allows that, years ago, he recorded another Great American Songbook standard for ECM, playing on a version of “For All We Know” on a record by guitarist Ralph Towner. “But I just love ‘Alfie’—love the tune, and just wanted to record it. For a couple of years now we’ve been using it as an encore…