Innehållsförteckning för Sep-17 från Stereophile

Not-So-Giant Steps I’m a thirty-year-old puppy doing what I’m told And I’m told there’s no more coal for the older engines,” —ANDY PARTRIDGE, “Train Running Low on Sould Coal” “[We] know the truth of this: We would likely live happily ever after with a system from nearly 60 years ago. An idler-drive turntable, some Marantz electronics, and Quad ESL-57s can be very satisfying. The main improvements to be made are not necessarily in the area of musical enjoyment, but rather boring old reliability.” Charley Hansen of Ayre Acoustics, who made these observations in an e-conversation two years ago, gives himself too little credit: He and many of his colleagues have not only made playback gear that’s more durable than average, they’ve also succeeded in making playback gear that’s safer to…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophilesocieties. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@XLinkAudio.com. 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 20, 2–5 pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at The Source Audio/Video Design Group (3035 Kashiwa Street, Torrance 90505). Our hosts, Steven and Jason Lord, will demonstrate top-of-the-line equipment in spaces custom-designed to showcase both the sonic and visual arts. This meeting will highlight McIntosh Laboratory, with the biggest presentation in California by their No.1 US dealer. Also…

Long ago, I stopped associating Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with dancing. Now, every time I hear it, I immediately flash on broken battlements, a black cape, and Béla Lugosi’s unmistakable Hungarian accent: “Listen to them—cheelllldreennn of dee night. What muuuusic they make!” Then there were James Bernard’s tense scores for the Hammer films—like Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), starring Christopher Lee—that my parents somehow let me see in a theater when I was seven, as part of an afternoon of bargain monster movies that included all the sourballs and unbuttered popcorn you could wolf down. Scared to death, my life was forever changed. Finally, as someone who’s complained mercilessly that author Stephen King had not and perhaps never would be done right by on screens large or small—a…

Iused DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Kii Three’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield responses. I fed MLSSA’s single-ended analog output to the Three’s balanced XLR jack using an adapter, and used the Kii Control to set the speaker’s operating conditions, including setting the polarity to Pos, and disabling the contour and boundary equalization so that I’d be examining the Three’s fundamental behavior. Had I read Kal Rubinson’s review text when I began taking the measurements, I would not have been surprised by what I found at first. When using MLSSA to measure a speaker’s quasi-anechoic performance, I usually set the program to capture about 10 milliseconds of data. However, when I took my first measurement,…

Sometimes, a successful recording is not about the material, the studio, the producer, or even the players involved. Sometimes, it’s about a shared feeling that grows among the players and conjures a groove. Grooves can be hard to find, especially among accomplished players recording together for the first time who have styles, ideas, and egos of their own. But once achieved, this invisible bond, this feeling of being in sync, should sound easy—as if there’s nothing to it. It’s this sort of natural, authentic pace and feeling that makes Hudson, the first recording from the quartet of Jack DeJohnette, Larry Grenadier, John Medeski, and John Scofield, such a success. The quartet, all of whom live nearby the artistic nexus of Woodstock— whose name was once attached to a 1969 music…

At a time where everyone is listening to music on streaming, we feel like it’s a better marketing environment.” –JONATHAN BRADLEY Classical Music Streaming 2.0 Hope does actually seem to spring eternal—at least in the ever-shrinking classical record business. In June, in the unlikely venue of New York City’s Bowery Ballroom, a new streaming service devoted to classical music, Primephonic, was launched. With a pre-existing download store established by Pentatone Records, a mobile application about to be launched, freshly inked licensing deals with Sony Music and Warner Music in their pockets and a contract with Universal Music in the works, and a $14.95 per month price, the two Primephonic principals I spoke with were optimistic. “The basic proposition for Primephonic is that we have FLAC 16-bit streaming, which is CD…

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. Don Garber Editor: I was deeply saddened to hear of Don Garber’s passing. Individuals of such uniqueness and exceptional talent are rare and memorable. Though I had not had the pleasure of meeting him in person, and was merely hoping to get in the long line for one of his creations, he has inspired me a great deal. From the perspective of an architect and designer, his amplifiers blew everything else out of the water, and I can only imagine what they sound like. I hope to…

“What are you doing for your 40th?”, everyone asked. We thought about it and decided that since we aren’t wild about lavish cakes (although we do love a tasty fastelavnsbolle), we’d celebrate a little differently. Even the thought of making new speakers makes us warm and fuzzy, so that’s what we chose to do. Meet the Special Forty: hygge for your ears. Laurels aren’t for resting on, which is why we gave Dynaudio Labs free rein to play. (It gave our accountants a heart attack). Our only instruction: take our classic tech and see what you’d do differently this time. Their design was nothing short of genius. They took our classic Esotar 28mm soft-dome tweeter design, put our DSR* precision coating on it and then machined an aerodynamic vent into…

In equipment reports, I use the phrase forward momentum to refer to something a little deeper and more encompassing than what’s meant by that well-worn Brit-fiexpression pace, rhythm, and timing (PRaT).1 Pace refers to the speed at which a piece of music is being played, and the accurate reproduction of that speed requires audio sources with good dynamic pitch stability. (Digital folk always lord it over LP clingers for digital’s superior pitch stability.) Rhythm is a sequential pattern of any kind, and pattern is the building block of musical expression. Rhythm is especially important. I define intelligence as pattern recognition; therefore, dancing, foot tapping, and head bobbing are proofs of a high musical IQ. When I know that a pattern exists, but am unable to define it, I call it…

Imeasured the Ayre Acoustics QX-5 Twenty with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4), using both the Audio Precision’s optical and electrical digital outputs, USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro running on battery power with Pure Music 3.0 playing WAV and AIFF test-tone files, and via Ethernet with Roon 1.3 playing the same files. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the Ayre as “Ayre USB Interface” from “Ayre Acoustics,” and the serial number as “Streamlength(tm).” The QX-5’s USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that, via USB, the Ayre accepted 24-bit integer data. The optical inputs locked to datastreams with sample rates up to 96kHz, the AES/EBU and S/PDIF inputs to streams of up to 192kHz. In…

Imeasured the Sutherland Duo phono preamplifier using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com, and the January 2008 “As We See It” at www.stereophile.com/content/measurements- maps-precision). As always with phono stages, I experimented with the grounding between the Sutherland and the Audio Precision system to get the lowest level of noise, though the Duo’s twin enclosures made this more complicated than usual. I ended up floating the Audio Precision’s outputs from ground and connecting both Duos’ grounding posts to the analyzer ground. The Duo preserved absolute polarity, and the output impedance was a low 199 ohms at all audioband frequencies. The measured gain was close to specification, ranging from 40.6dB when set to “40,” to 46.25dB (“46”), 52.3dB (“52”), 57.7dB (“58”), and 63.67dB (“64”). So was the input impedance at 1kHz,…

GERMANY: MUNICH Paul Messenger The 2017 High End show, held May 10–13 in Munich, made it clear that in global high-end hi-fi, the Germans have grabbed the high ground and have no intention of losing control of it anytime soon. And despite a rumor that the MOC venue might shortly be repossessed by its owners—car maker BMW—the show organizers apparently have a contract until at least 2020. OFFICIAL STATS: 538 exhibitors from 44 countries (+4%) 21,412 visitors (+10%) 8002 trade visitors from 78 countries (+13% from 2016). After spending a couple of days trying to cover the vast show, I admitted defeat. Nonetheless, I saw that laptops were far outnumbered by turntables and a few open-reel tape recorders (mostly from Nagra); that tube amps seemed to hold the advantage over…

Nelson Pass is a consummate engineer, but he got his start in physics, earning a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis. As he worked on his degree, he was already an audio designer, focusing on loudspeakers—great training for a designer of audio amplifiers. Soon, in 1974, he cofounded Threshold Audio with René Besne, of audio and folk-dancing fame; their goal was to build electronics, partly because the field is less competitive—it’s harder than building speakers. As he told Thomas J. Norton in “Simple Sounds Better,” an interview in the November 1991 issue of Stereophile,1 Pass created one of the first high-power class-A amplifiers: the Threshold 800A. He’d dreamed up its key technical approaches in the back of a bus, on his way to visit a cave.2 Also in 1991 he founded…

Imeasured the Mytek Manhattan II with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4), using both the Audio Precision’s optical and electrical digital outputs and USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro running on battery power with Pure Music 3.0 playing WAV and AIFF test-tone files. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the Mytek as “Manhattan II DAC Control\ 000” from “Mytek Digital\000,” with the serial-number field occupied by “03303-1703-050.” The USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode, and Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that, via USB, the Mytek accepted 24-bit integer data at all sample rates from 44.1 to 384kHz. In variable mode with its volume control set to “100,” the Mytek’s maximum output level at 1kHz was a very high 10.6V from…

At the risk of offending nearly every designer and manufacturer of loudspeakers, I think we have not seen anything really new in a long time. Casting a gimlet eye at Stereophile’s “Recommended Components” reveals some electrostatic and planar-magnetic models, a few horns, and lots and lots of cones and domes in boxes. Those cones and domes have voice-coils inductively driven by permanent magnets, and overwhelmingly use passive crossovers. Innovation in speakers mostly takes the form of advancements in materials science and, to a much lesser degree, cabinet shape. All helpful, but not revolutionary. In contrast, almost everything about Kii Audio’s Three loudspeaker ($11,500/pair) is a refreshing splash of cool water. Sure, it’s a box with round diaphragms driven by voice-coils in magnetic fields, but beyond that, it embodies a design…

Imeasured the Octave Audio V 80 SE 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). Measurements were taken with the Octave’s rearpanel switch set to High Power, as recommended for the KT150 output-stage tubes. (I didn’t use the Super Black Box power-supply capacitance booster.) After warming up the amplifier for an hour, I checked the bias for each of the four output tubes, using the central LED array and the right-hand rotary switch on the front panel. All tubes were correctly biased for KT150s, with the red and green LEDs illuminated for each tube. The maximum voltage gain at 1kHz from the speaker terminals into 8 ohms measured 38.75dB for both the unbalanced and balanced inputs. Both…

DEVORE FIDELITY ORANGUTAN O/96 LOUDSPEAKER In my May 2009 Follow-Up review of DeVore Fidelity’s Gibbon Nine loudspeaker, I said it was quite wonderful.1 I bought a pair. Though I heard a slight “woody” coloration, I didn’t consider that a flaw. In my subsequent conversations with the speaker’s designer, John DeVore, he disagreed with my characterization, arguing that what I was hearing was authentic, natural sound—the sound captured on the recordings of acoustic music that I was listening to. What DeVore said was plausible; maybe other speakers I’d heard had failed to capture that quality. And I had to admit that the appearance of the Gibbons could have affected my perception—they look very “woody.” However, now that I’ve lived with the Gibbon Nines for almost eight years, listening to them nearly…

Bel Canto e.One REF600M Editor: We would like to thank Stereophile and Herb Reichert for the insightful Follow-Up review of the REF600Ms. We designed the REF600Ms to achieve what Herb experienced in his review: “extremely refined, authoritative, and lifelike” amplification. We recognized over 15 years ago that efficiency was the greatest advantage of class-D operation, and combining that efficiency with our custom implementation, we achieve a true and more lifelike playback of the recorded event…