Innehållsförteckning för Jun-14 från Stereophile

Why Music? Why does music matter so much to so many of us? Some, like Stereophile’s readers, go to great lengths to reproduce it in their homes with accuracy and impact, and build libraries of their favorite works. Others, like my daughters, don’t care much about equipment, but find it hard to spend more than five minutes in a car without listening to music. We go to concerts, play instruments, hum tunes, sing. Why? Why does music seem to speak to so many more of us than do, say, painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, or even literature? Maybe we shouldn’t even ask the question; maybe writing about music is like dancing about architecture (to paraphrase Martin Mull, whose original quotation was about painting1). However, music is probably tough enough to withstand…

THIS ISSUE: More on VPI’s Classic Direct turntable and the JMW Memorial 3D-printed 12" tonearm. VPI Does Direct Drive, Part 2 The day after I submitted the first part of my review of the Classic Direct turntable and 3D-printed 12" tonearm, for publication in the May issue, VPI’s Harry Weisfeld e-mailed to tell me that I had to remove the five blue rubber grommets that separate the motor-and-platter module from the plinth: “You won’t believe what you hear.” He also said that he’d decided that the power supply’s plain (as in homely) case was unbefitting a $30,000 product, and so was upgrading it to something more attractive. Using the T-handle that comes standard with the VPI, a friend and I lifted the platter-motor-bearing assembly off the plinth, plucked the five…

THIS ISSUE: ATC’s different-drummer SCM19 sealed-box loudspeaker. “Where are the sealed boxes of yesteryear?” Were one in a whimsical mood, one could divide the history of hi-fi into the eras before and after Edgar Villchur (1917–2011), inventor of the sealed-box, air suspension (or acoustic suspension) bass-loading principle. It was Villchur’s invention of the acoustic-suspension woofer that made possible affordable loudspeakers with deeper bass from a smaller cabinet (see Sidebar: “Sealed Boxes”). I don’t know if hi-fi can claim any true Renaissance men, but Edgar Villchur is as close as anyone gets. As a student at New York’s City College, he aspired to work as a theatrical set designer, and later earned a master’s degree in art history. Villchur’s WWII service was as a radio and radar technician. After the war,…

MONOBLOCK POWER AMPLIFIER A year or so ago, in my review of the Pass Labs XP-30 preamplifier, 1 I wrote that the heart of an audio system is the preamplifier, in that it sets the overall quality of the system’s sound. But it is the power amplifier that is responsible for determining the character of the system’s sound, because it is the amplifier that must directly interface with the loudspeakers. The relationship between amplifier and loudspeaker is complex, and the nature of that relationship literally sets the tone of the sound quality. I first became aware of the significance of a system’s amplifier with one of the first reviews of mine ever published: of the Krell KSA-50 amplifier, in the August 1983 issue of British magazine Hi-Fi News & Record…

Primare CD32 CD PLAYER Audiophiles spend a lot of time thinking about the law of diminishing returns. We’d all agree that spending $1000 to replace an iPhone and generic earbuds with one of Stephen Mejias’s “Entry Level” systems is in the early, steep part of the curve: a huge jump in performance for relatively small investment. We’d also agree, or at least suspect, that after you’ve spent that $1000, the curve gets a lot flatter. What we don’t agree on is the shape of the curve between these points. The ideal situation is to find the knee: the point at which the curve’s slope changes dramatically. At the knee, we’ve gotten most of what we want, and the next increment of performance improvement is disproportionally expensive. For me, the knee…

The link between jazz and the works of Igor Stravinsky is well known. In Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, his landmark 1959 collaboration with Robert Craft, the composer mentions jazz artists like Art Tatum and Charlie Christian. The fact that Stravinsky was captivated by the improvisational freedom of jazz and its insistent, inventive rhythms makes all his work, especially Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), a natural for jazz players to play and quote from, and over the years they have more than obliged. Charlie Parker, in particular, peppered his impossibly fluid blasts of ideas with quotations from The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. The pounding, nervously rhythmic The Augurs of Spring, the Rite’s second section, was a favorite of Parker’s, and he famously recorded a snatch of…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR 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. Publish all the reviews Editor: John Atkinson was right about the need to conduct a proper review in order to know if a product deserved to be reviewed in the first place (“The Selection Conundrum,” “Letters,” April 2014, p.11). However, there is no paradox here—you just need to publish all reviews conducted by the magazine, positive and negative. —Yory Teperman yory.teperman@gmail.com We do publish every review that we prepare, Mr. Teperman, and we prepare reviews of every product we are sent for review.…

THIS ISSUE: Has the high-end audio industry created the seeds of its destruction? There’s a storm coming Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.—William Morris (1834–1896) The Arts and Crafts movement, which took root in England in the late 1800s, was more than just a reaction to the poor working conditions and the soulless, shoddy, superfluously decorated wares associated with the early days of mass production. It was a rejection of Victorian attitudes toward class: of a mindset that promoted a chasm, in industry as in society, between the designer and the craftsman, the architect and the stonemason. Writer and designer William Morris, regarded by many as the father of the movement, envisioned a Utopian society in which the…

THIS ISSUE: Terry Teachout’s new Duke Ellington biography. Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (New York: Gotham Books, 2013). 483 pp. Hardcover, $30. According to Terry Teachout, Duke Ellington’s story is one of “a somewhat better-than-average stride pianist largely devoid of formal musical training [who] managed to turn himself into a great composer.” Ellington had ample help from his organization, which included the gifted composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, who succinctly described his employer’s modus operandi: “Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington effect.” Without standout band members, and without Strayhorn himself, that effect would have been significantly less memorable. Teachout,…

PREAMPLIFIER When I began my journey into audiophilia, I was in awe of the Audio Research Corporation’s flagship SP preamplifiers. As I sat there in the early 1980s with my modest Apt Holman preamp, all of my friends had ARC SP6Bs. By today’s standards, the SP6B was colored, did not portray a realistic soundstage, and lacked sufficient gain to amplify the low-output moving-coil cartridges of the day. But it had an intimacy in the midrange that was intoxicating. (Still considered a classic design by many, the SP6B’s price on the used market has remained virtually unchanged for 30 years.) Then, still in the early ’80s, ARC raised the bar with the SP10 ($3700). It had 15 tubes and an outboard power supply, and set a new standard for delicacy, drama,…

ELECTROSTATIC SUPERTWEETER For Jason Victor Serinus, one of the highlights of the 2013 T.H.E. Show in Newport Beach, California, was the public debut of the Sopranino—a hornloaded, self-polarized, electrostatic supertweeter from EnigmAcoustics. In his report (see http://tinyurl.com/qgmfcp8), Jason wrote about the sound of a pair of Sopraninos used atop Magico V3 speakers: “only folks with severe hearing loss would have missed how the sound opened up when the Sopranino was switched in.” Well, as you can read later, I don’t have hearing loss, and I did also hear an improvement with the Sopranino. So when I visited the Californian company’s dem room at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, I asked for review samples. The Sopranino Costing $3690/pair, the Sopraninos come in a handsome wooden box. The EnigmAcoustics…

THIS ISSUE: Astell&Kern, Dirac Research, Lector Strumenti, Lehmannaudio, Music Hall, Ortofon, and VTL comment on our reviews of their products. Astell&Kern AK100 Mk.2 Editor: Thank you for listing the Astell&Kern AK100 Mk.2 as a “Recommended Component” in the April 2014 issue of Stereophile (p.73). The price of the AK100 Mk.2 is actually $799. The magazine has it listed as $699. The original AK100 is priced at $699. The new Mk.2 Is $799 and also includes a leather case. The case was a separate purchase for the original AK100. Jason Henriques For Astell&Kern Dirac Research Live Room Correction Suite Editor: We feel honored and grateful for the eloquent review regarding our Live Room Correction Suite software, in May 2014 (p.55). There is no doubt that Mr. Kalman Rubinson has tested the…

AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should e-mail the when, where, and who to john.atkinson@sorc.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the August 2014 issue is May 23, 2014. US: NEW YORK John Atkinson It was the summer of 2000. We had closed Stereophile’s office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the City Different in the Land of Enchantment, where the magazine had been headquartered since 1978, and moved lock, stock, and audio systems to New York City.1 Other than myself, the only full-time staff to move to New York were music editor Robert Baird and advertising sales representative Laura LoVecchio, so I was faced with hiring a new editorial team. My new managing editor, Nerissa Dominguez-Vales, and…

THIS ISSUE: In SM’s final column, he ponders memory, venery, PonoMusic, the future, the past, and Music Hall’s c-dac15.3 CD player and a15.3 integrated amp. More Venery, More Love What a good rogering can do In response to my review of Music Hall’s USB-1 turntable, 1 that company’s founder and president for life, Roy Hall, noted my detailed explanation of the product, diverse taste in music, and keen attention to minutiae. He then offered six words of final observation that will, if there is any justice in this world, go down in Stereophile lore: “The kid has gotta get laid.” Hall was right, of course. And, perhaps as he anticipated, now that I’m regularly getting laid (thanks, Ms. Little), I’ve developed a different relationship with hi-fi. I don’t care about…

can an indie pop trio really cause trouble? it’s simple. Then again, it’s not. The trio Hospitality make sweet-tinged, brainy indie pop, yet fill it with enough musical veers and whirls to make it appealingly nerdish and strangely unique. Singer-guitarist Amber Papini writes lyrics that are exact and full of life, yet equally fascinated with dark corners and menacing possibility. Sometimes, as in “I Miss Your Bones,” whose riffs and chanted refrain have a whiff of the band Television about them, these extremes happen in the same song: “Take me on a plane tonight / Let’s dive like doves” is preceded by “Of black and lonely / And everlasting loss lack abyss.” Her music doesn’t fit into neat categories, and often eschews the timeworn A-B-C structure of verse-chorusbridge for something…

Lector Strumenti Audio Digitube S-192 D/A CONVERTER Ten years ago, the average consumer was unaware that he or she needed an e-book reader. Since that time, neither those people nor the authors whose books they consume have changed very much. But the people in between have grown restless and unsatisfied, and it is they who call the tune. Consequently, many of you have gone from owning books to sort of, kind of owning books (and sort of, kind of not). Just as the publishing industry has devised a new way to empty your wallet, so has the record industry found a new way to entice you into buying Kind of Blue for the ump-teenth time.1 That’s depressing. But, on the bright side, the latest way of buying digital music has…

THIS ISSUE: A third listen to Stereophile’s Product of the Year for 2013. KEF LS50 In December 2013, the KEF LS50 loudspeaker1 was named Stereophile’s Budget Product and Overall Component of the Year, marking the first time in 22 years of voting that any component had earned this strange double distinction. Consider the achievement: The former award is typically granted to products that provide outstanding value but may nevertheless exhibit some obvious, albeit carefully considered, compromise(s); the latter, loftier award is often won by cost-no-object, flagship designs that shun even the thought of compromise and inhabit only our wildest audiophile fantasies. It’s unusual for an audio component to be both reasonably priced and unquestionably elite. The LS50 managed it. Still, if anyone could have predicted the LS50’s rare accomplishment, it…

THERE’S ONLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC: THE BLUES AND ZIPPETY DOO-DAH.—TOWNES VAN ZANDT “I’m back on dry land once again Opportunity awaits me like a rat in a drain We’re all hunting honey with money to burn Just a short time to show you the tricks that we’ve learned.” Sweet Painted Lady Heard recently at a party in Brooklyn: “Man, when I heard the first bars of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,’ it really creeped me out.” A friend’s caustically funny wife was referring to the way Elton John’s archetypal tune is used to portend a climactic moment in the film American Hustle. A great work of art is like a prism: turn it and everyone sees something different. Over the years, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, perhaps the greatest double album…