Innehållsförteckning för Oct-17 från Stereophile

THIS ISSUE: Might the recorded music business be in better shape? THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS Digital audio forever disrupted the way music is recorded, mixed, and mastered—and, to even greater extents, how music is distributed, sold, played, and consumed. Music unmolested by zeros and ones is now nearly extinct. There’s no going back, but what if, in 1983, the Compact Disc had bombed? What if music lovers worldwide had rejected the shiny new digital format because they thought LPs sounded so much better? And what if later attempts at digital formats with higher resolutions also shriveled and died, due to lack of interest by recording engineers and consumers? What if, to this day, music had remained all-analog? The digital juggernaut laid waste to much of…

INSIDER VIEWS ON EVERYTHING VINYL The death of a company founder, whether sudden or expected, often produces trauma. Whoever was tapped to replace the visionary Steve Jobs would be handed a thankless task, but at Apple, timid Tim Cook’s so-far unimaginative performance as caretaker demonstrates the difficulties of succession. As Jobs beat Sony to the iPod, Cook let Amazon beat him to the Alexa. Apple missed the lead on streaming audio, playing catch-up by buying the MOG music service, which was transformed into Beats Music in 2014. Apparently, Cook doesn’t think it’s worth pursuing high-resolution audio for iTunes. He’s obviously got the resources and the audio talent, but he’s going to let others lead in that area while he plays catch-up with other already-developing technologies. In our little corner of…

EXPLORING THE ANALOG ADVENTURE Remasterings of recordings make me angry—they mess with my memories of the songs I love, especially songs from the 1960s that I played in my bedroom on a cheap Garrard turntable through Lafayette speakers. Like my first girlfriend, these songs permanently entered my psyche and modified my DNA. When songs I’ve heard a thousand times are remastered or remixed, they sound wrong and weird to me. They make my inner hard drive skip as I try to figure out what was changed, and why. This is especially true with Beatles reissues. One day, in high school, the nerdy girl who sat in front of me in math turned around and said, “The Beatles are coming! The Beatles are coming!” I groaned and rolled my eyes. I…

We got our wish. Phonograph ownership is once again depicted as commonplace, even hip, in popular films, TV shows, and ads for other products. Turntables and LP jackets show up in photos in Elle Decor and Vanity Fair. New LPs are sold in stores in nice neighborhoods, and in malls with Cinnabon franchises and J.Crew stores. A shockingly high percentage of new record releases in which normal people are interested, and a few in which they are not, are now available on vinyl. For the first time in decades, I receive occasional gifts of new LPs—presumably because they’re once again easy for nonenthusiasts to find and to buy—and the very few CDs I’ve received in the past few years have been homemade. We got our wish, but now there’s a…

Iused DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the KEF Reference 5’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and inroom responses. The Reference 5’s specified sensitivity is 90dB/2.83V/m; my estimate was slightly lower, at 89.1dB(B)/2.83V/m. Its impedance is specified as 8 ohms with a minimum magnitude of 3.2 ohms. Fig.1 shows how the impedance and electrical phase vary with frequency. While the impedance lies above 8 ohms in the low treble, it remains between 4 and 5 ohms throughout the midrange and bass and in the top octaves. The minimum value was 3.3 ohms between 90 and 100Hz, but as the phase angle is generally benign, the Reference 5 should work well with tube amplifiers from their 4 ohm…

JASON VICTOR SERINUS: What are some of the major differences between the Momentum and Progression monoblocks? DAN D’AGOSTINO: I took the best parts of the Momentum’s more sophisticated and complex circuitry and put them in the Progression, without using the same high parts count. Each stage of the Momentum’s gain amplifier is separate, with input stage and driver stages on separate rails. All of the Momentum’s devices are designed for maximum performance in a small package, which requires a lot more of them, and a significantly bigger input card than the Progression’s. These differences create subtleties, because I’m able to run much higher current in the Momentum’s front end. I can get more power from the Progression because it’s a balanced amplifier with a balanced output stage. The Momentum’s output…

Art Dudley’s video Editor: I very much enjoyed Art’s video about his listening room (www.stereophile.com/ content/reviewer-video-profile-art-dudley). I wish all you guys would do one. —Steve Underwood junderwood6569@charter.net Our editorial coordinator and videographer Jana Dagdagan is working her way through the writing team. As well as Art Dudley’s profile, you can find Herb Reichert’s at www.stereophile.com/content/reviewer-video-profileherb- reichert, and Steve Guttenberg’s at www.stereophile.com/content/steve-guttenberg-i-amaudiophile. By the time this issue hits newsstands, you will also be able to find online video profiles of Michael Fremer and Kal Rubinson. —John Atkinson Art Dudley’s insights Editor: Regarding Art Dudley’s insights on enjoying one’s music listening, it occurred to me: As music lovers, audiophiles can gain greater enjoyment of what they listen to by pursuing insights beyond the immediate visceral impacts they experience while listening. I often pursue…

Iperformed a full set of measurements on the Linear Tube Audio ZOTL40 Mk.II, using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/ measurements-maps-precision). The ZOTL40’s voltage gain into 8 ohms measured a lower-than-average 21.1dB from both its Direct and Volume Control unbalanced inputs, and both inputs preserved absolute polarity (ie, were non-inverting). The Direct input impedance measured 44.5k ohms at low and middle frequencies, dropping to a still high 39k ohms at 20kHz. Via the Volume Control input, the input impedance was lower, at close to 23k ohms across the audioband. The output impedance was moderately high, at 1.05 ohms at 20Hz and 1kHz, increasing to 1.65 ohms at 20kHz. As a result, there were response variations up to ±0.9dB with our standard simulated…

EUROPE John Atkinson As you can see from the logo on our Staff page (p.8) and reproduced here, Stereophile has accepted an invitation to be inducted into the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA), as the exclusive US member of the EISA’s Hi-Fi Expert Group. (At the same time, our sister magazine Sound & Vision was inducted as the exclusive US member of the HT Video Expert Group.) The categories of US and European may seem mutually exclusive; but last May, at the EISA Convention in Antwerp, Belgium, the members supported Paul Miller, EISA president and editor of the UK’s Hi-Fi News magazine, in an initiative to take the Association worldwide. EISA (www.eisa.eu) is the biggest and, at nearly 40 years, the oldest general consumer-electronics awards association in the world;…

Record collectors felt differently. The prices of cutouts were right— usually, from 99¢ to a penny under two bucks. And cutouts were better than digging through crates because the records were still sealed . . . even if the jackets were a bit mangled. The beauty of cutouts was that they were so cheap, you could afford to be lav- ish, and go home with anything that caught your fancy. It was in a cutout bin—in a Pittsburgh National Record Mart, I believe—that I first came upon Nigel Lived, an oddity with an antique phrenological chart on the cover, by an artist—Murray Head—whose last name seemed to fit. After one listen to the track “Junk”—a mashup of musical theater, screamed vocals, oinking pigs, folky acoustic guitars, unhinged fiddles, and funky…

Iinitially measured one of the Dan D’Agostino Master Audio Systems Progression Mono monoblocks (serial no. PMO26P) with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/ measurements-maps-precision). Before doing any testing of a power amplifier, I precondition it by running it at one-third its specified power into 8 ohms for 60 minutes. This power level results in the highest thermal stress on the output devices of an amplifier having a class-B or -AB output stage. After an hour driving 167W into 8 ohms, the temperature of the Progression’s top panel and heatsinks was fairly high, at 109.8°F (41.3°C). With the amplifier cold, the THD+noise at this power level was 0.04%; after the hour, it had dropped to 0.025%. The voltage gain into 8 ohms for…

Iperformed a full set of measurements on the Rega Brio, using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/ measurements-maps-precision). Via its line inputs, the Brio’s maximum voltage gain into 8 ohms was typical for an integrated amplifier, at 39.55dB. The amplifier inverted absolute polarity for line input signals at both the speaker terminals and headphone jack, and its input impedance at 20Hz and 1kHz was, at 41k ohms, fairly close to the specified 47k ohms. Though the line input impedance dropped to 36k ohms at 20kHz, this will be inconsequential. The headphone output impedance was a high 107 ohms from 20Hz to 20kHz, so will not be optimal with low-impedance headphones. However, the output impedance at the speaker terminals was very low, measuring…

IsoAcoustics Inc. has its head office in Ontario and its manufacturing facilities in China, and is headed by Dave Morrison, who for 20 years has been involved in designing radio and television studios for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The IsoAcoustics products are the result of this experience. Although relatively new on the consumer-audio market, IsoAcoustics’ speaker-isolation products have gained wide acceptance in pro audio; their client list of recording and mastering studios includes Blackbird (Nashville), Mastering Palace (NYC), Flux (NYC), United Recording (LA), the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Skywalker Ranch, and Abbey Road. I first became aware of IsoAcoustics at the 2015 Montreal Salon Son et Image, where they had a demo comparing the sounds of two pairs of Focal 906 loudspeakers on Focal floor stands: one set rested on IsoAcoustics…

EDITOR’S PICK RECORDING OF THE MONTH DOC AND MERLE WATSON Bear’s Sonic Journals Never the Same Way Once: Live at the Boarding House May 1974 Owsley Stanley Foundation (7 CDs). 2017. Hawk, exec prod.; Starfinder Stanley, Jeffrey Norman, Pete Bell, project coordinators; Owsley Stanley, orig. eng.; Jeffrey Norman, CD mastering, tape archivist; John Chester, Jaime Howarth, digital transfers. ADD? TT: 5:33:17 PERFORMANCE SONICS The late Owsley “Bear” Stanley spent his life raising consciousness. Whether it was mixing up jars of LSD, building his famous Wall of Sound PA system for the Grateful Dead, or supervising the creation of an incredible library of live recordings, Bear Stanley was after a certain purity, a higher level of quality, epiphanies. He recorded a stash of music that runs to more than 1000 reels of…

THERE’S ONLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC: THE BLUES AND ZIPPETY DOO-DAH. —TOWNES VAN ZANDT A library of properly stored tapes spanning 30 years of live performances, possibly including shows by Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, and Miles Davis, all recorded by an engineer known for his attention to detail and scrupulous recording standards? Talk about a fishy-sounding pitch . . . Among serious music fans and audiophiles, the mirage of the undiscovered, unreleased tape library hovers before many a mind’s eye. How many times in my 21 years as music editor of this fine publication have I opened an e-mail breathlessly announcing the discovery of a cache of unreleased tapes—often of jazz greats— only to then watch the alleged shining trove bog down, after one release, in problems with clearances, money,…