Innehållsförteckning för October 2021 från Stereophile

THIS ISSUE: Some 25 years since it went mainstream, the internet has largely displaced terrestrial radio, but there’s still work to be done. When I decided that Stereophile should review the McIntosh MAC7200 receiver (see the review in the January 2021 issue1), I had several reasons for doing so. First, McIntosh is known for the quality of its radio tuners and amplifiers, so I was confident it would be an impressive product. (It was.) Second, a review of a terrestrial radio receiver in 2021 had a certain retro appeal that I thought Stereophile readers might appreciate. Third, as Larry Greenhill wrote in the introduction to that review, I like terrestrial radio. I like it despite having lived most of my life in places where the radio offerings were limited. All…

In 1968, I was a 2-year-old toddler living in Paris, France—my birthplace—on the 14th floor of a diplomat-occupied apartment complex overlooking the Seine. My dad, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was stationed in Paris, working security at the Canadian embassy. My mom and I were there with him. At that moment, six hours away by car, across the English Channel in the country next door, a new audio company sprung up and surprised and delighted the audio world with its inaugural product, the 20Wpc Cambridge Consultants P40 integrated amplifier. It sounded especially good and made history as the first amplifier to use a toroidal transformer. Cambridge Audio emerged from the shadow of Cambridge Consultants. It built amplifiers, tuners, and transmission line speakers and, starting in 1985, the…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the KLH Model Five’s frequency response in the farfield. The manual doesn’t specify a vertical listening axis, but with the loudspeaker sitting on its Slant Riser Base, it appears that the tweeter axis will be typical for a seated listener. My reference axis for the measurements was therefore in line with the tweeter. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses and Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system to measure the impedance. KLH specifies the Model Five’s freefield sensitivity as 87.5dB/2.83V/m; my estimate was 87.9dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is within the margin of experimental error. The Model Five’s impedance is specified as 6 ohms with a minimum magnitude of 3.5 ohms at 140Hz. Fig.1 was taken with…

AS THE TITLE OF A FAN BLOG PUTS IT, INDIE IS NOT A GENRE. IT IS POTENTIALLY EVERY GENRE. IT’S AN ATTITUDE, AN APPROACH, A COMMITMENT TO SELF-EXPRESSION WITHOUT REGARD TO, OR IN SPITE OF, MAINSTREAM DEMANDS. IT’S THE BLEND THAT NOBODY CAN LABEL, THE OUTRÉ, THE AHEAD-OF-ITS-TIME, THE DEFIANTLY RETRO. AS EMOTIONALLY SATISFYING AS THAT WIDE-RANGING DEFINITION IS, THE RECORDING OF INDIE MUSIC OFTEN PAYS THE PRICE IN SOUND QUALITY. MANY INDEPENDENT ARTISTS CAN’T AFFORD TO DO IT RIGHT, DON’T KNOW HOW, OR HAVE DECIDED THAT TOP-NOTCH PRODUCTION AND ENGINEERING REPRESENT THE ESTABLISHMENT AND THEREFORE HAVE NO PLACE IN THEIR ART. Indie music is often not taken seriously by home audio aficionados. After all, the indie scene is the birthplace of lo-fi and bedroom pop, recordings made on someone’s…

Rhino R2655956 (2CD). 2021. Grateful Dead, prod.; Bob Matthews, Betty Cantor, David Glasser, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS As the 1960s became the ’70s, the Grateful Dead went through a remarkable transition. After unsuccessfully trying to reinvent the wheel in the studio and finally clicking with Live Dead, the group found its mojo. In 1970, the band released its two greatest studio albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. But the Dead made its bones on live performances, and early in ’71 they decided to make another live record even though they had enough songs for another studio album. Grateful Dead (known affectionately as Skull and Roses after the iconic cover illustration) caught the Dead at a sweet spot. This stripped-down version of the band (essentially a quartet after drummer Mickey Hart’s departure…

La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Hespèrion XXI/Jordi Savall. AliaVox AVSA 9943 (3 CDs). 2021. Manuel Mohino and Elie Hanquart, prod. and eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS The formidable Latin title merely means “Office of Holy Week”—the Divine Office prayed at prescribed times by the Catholic clergy. Here, the Matins (morning prayers) for the Easter Triduum have been adapted for choral celebration, interspersed with appropriate chants and instrumental processionals, as in the actual liturgies. Savall has prepared this edition carefully. His choices of whether and when to have instruments reinforce the voices and when to use female or male voices all make musical and dramatic sense. (The women make less-dense sounds than the men, who make some of the alto parts sound quite high. Everyone manages straight tone well, so the differences are…

Spektral Quartet Sono Luminus DSL-92250 (reviewed in 24/352.8 stereo WAV). 2021. Dan Merceruio, prod.; Daniel Shores, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS The aborted premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s first string quartet, Enigma (2019), is a case of music that upends being upended by the unexpected. Commissioned by the thrice Grammy–nominated Spektral Quartet, the 28-minute Enigma was on course for performance at Carnegie Hall and on a National Planetarium 360°-immersion video tour when the pandemic went viral. Instead of touring, the Spektrals recorded the work within Sono Luminus’s studio, a stone church whose spacious acoustic is magnified here by amplification and artificial reverb that Thorvaldsdottir hoped would create a “warm resonating sound.” This is the point where basic facts cede to otherworldly wonders. Enigma’s opening leads us into a realm Spektral violist Doyle Armbrust…

David Helbock, piano; Sebastian Studnitzky, trumpet; Arne Jansen, guitar. ACT 9927-2 (CD, also available as download, LP). 2021. Siggi Loch, prod.; Thomas Schöttel, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS David Helbock of Austria is his own man on piano. He wears strange hats with keyboard themes and sometimes plays a toy piano. Poker-faced wit is central to his music, but his passions can be explosive. The New Cool is a departure. It is more measured, moody, and lyrical than his previous work. It introduces a new trio with unusual instrumentation: piano, trumpet (Studnitzky), and guitar (Jansen). In contrast to many of today’s younger jazz composers, Helbock is interested in interpreting works by others, from Jack Bruce of Cream to Chopin. In fact, the covers here prove his creativity more than the originals do.…

THIS ISSUE: Representatives of OMA, Stenheim, Cambridge Audio, KLH, and Antipodes respond to our reviews of their products. OMA K3 On behalf of my team, including Richard Krebs, Frank Schroder, and Douglas Eisemann, I’d like to thank Michael Fremer and Stereophile for the unique honor of being featured in such a positive review in Stereophile. Even though OMA has been in business for over 15 years, this is actually our very first review in any audio magazine. We’ve had collaboration products like the SP10R plinth reviewed (by Michael Fremer as noted), but K3 marks our solo debut, and we are proud to bring K3 to the audio public after 7 long years of continuous development. The arm Frank Schroder developed for K3 is as revolutionary in its thinking and execution…

TAKE HEED! Unless marked otherwise, all letters to the magazine and its writers are assumed to be for possible publication. Please include your name and physical address. We reserve the right to edit for length and content. That’s acoustical reproduction, Charlie! Like Jason, I was entertained by Accuphase’s “awkwardly translated” online pdf for this unit. It claims that one result of using the DG-68 is that it will “provide the compensation to achieve ideal reproductive conditions.” I, for one, find that I can achieve that for a heck of a lot less than $24,000. I simply put on a Barry White or Antonio Carlos Jobim album, pour a glass of good Cabernet for my lady, and let the magic develop. Charlie Lein Forest, Virginia How low can you go? First…

THIS ISSUE: Mikey reviews another exotic ’table that costs as much as a rather nice house, the OMA K3. If you’re going to spend a year-plus in COVID lockdown, it doesn’t hurt to have a million dollars’ worth of turntables keeping you company, right? That’s been my good fortune. Sounds like a roomful, but it’s only three: the SAT XD1, the Air Force Zero, and the OMA K3 ($360,000).1 You’ll find this issue’s cover girl either strikingly beautiful or homely. Visitor reactions fall strongly into one of those two camps, with nothing in between. I love the looks. Whatever your opinion, the K3’s visual distinctiveness cannot be denied. The innards are equally unique. Looking somewhat like the Guggenheim Museum topped by a heliport and a construction crane, the cosmetically finalized…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Stenheim Alumine Three’s frequency response in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. (I measured serial number 20030028.) Owing to the Alumine Three’s weight—approximately 154lb—I wasn’t able to lift the loudspeaker as high off the ground as I like to do for the farfield measurements. As this meant that the reflections of the speaker’s output from the floor were closer in time to the direct sound, I had to window the impulse response data more aggressively than usual, which reduces the midrange resolution of the FFT-derived frequency responses. The Alumine Three’s sensitivity, measured in half-space and without any weighting, is specified as 93dB/2.83V/m. I examined the Stenheim’s voltage sensitivity both with…

THIS ISSUE: The quiet Beatle makes a big noise. Capitol/UMe 3565238 (5 CD, 1 Blu-ray). 2021. George Harrison, Phil Spector, Harrison, David Zonshine, prods.; Ken Scott, Philip McDonald, Paul Hicks, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Six weeks after the world’s biggest pop group broke up, the “Quiet Beatle” began work on a monumental three-LP album that stands tall a half-century later. George Harrison’s first solo album (his third if you count a movie soundtrack and an experimental-music record) is a masterpiece, a musical minestrone of influences and timestamps. For the artist, it was a sprawling release of creative energy too often pent up in the context of the Beatles. Beginning with two days of demos for co-producer Phil Spector, Harrison walked away from the smoldering wreckage that was the Beatles and immediately…

Rough Trade Records RTRADLP695 (LP). 1985. Green Gartside, David Gamson, Fred Maher, Arif Mardin, prods.; Ray Bardani, Gary Langan, Howard Gray, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS Cupid & Psyche 85 was the latest stop in Scritti Polliti’s musical journey. Singer/guitarist (and Mr. Scritti Politti) Green Gartside already had the band moving away from do-it-yourself scratchy post-punk toward a smoother, pop sound. Wanting to progress further, he decamped to New York with a new set of clothes and his head full of synthesizers and funk. There, he teamed with drummer Fred Maher and producer, songwriter, and keyboardist David Gamson (whose CV would later include Chaka Khan) to coproduce and cowrite the album. Gamson brought in top session musicians including guitarist Paul Jackson Jr. (Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Al Jarreau, others). Together, they created…

Trio Mediæval, vocals; Trygve Seim, saxophone; Mats Eilertsen, double bass. 2L-165 (24/352.8 MQA FLAC), 2021. Morten Lindberg & Arve Henriksen, co-prods.; Lindberg, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS In switching from ECM New Series to 2L, Norwegian women’s vocal ensemble Trio Mediæval has moved from a label known for atmospheric acoustics to one lauded for capturing resonant 3D space and pristine silences. Aided by label founder/producer/engineer Morten Lindberg, who has received 28 Grammy nominations and one Award, Trio Mediæval delivers sublime, realistic-sounding performances that can be enjoyed in SACD, MQA-CD, several surround-sound formats, and the stereo 24/352 MQA FLAC files I auditioned. Solacium is a collection of 16 gentle, sometimes dissonant hymns and lullabies. Most were passed down in Norway and the Swedish-speaking community of Estonia. Three are contemporary. Several were arranged by…

Simone, vocals, piano; Buck Clarke, Paul Robinson, drums; Leopoldo Fleming, percussion; Gene Taylor, bass; others. BMG BMGCAT461D (2LP, 2CD). 2021. Nick Bonard, Fraser Kennedy, Thierry Amsallem, prods.; Tony Cousins, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS Nina Simone was one of the most remarkable singers of the 20th century, but few albums capture her full range—heartbreak ballads, jazz, blues, rock, African rhythms, militant politics. Hence the value of The Montreux Years, which contains excerpts from all five of her concerts at the Montreux Jazz Festival between 1968 and 1990 and comes closer to comprehensiveness than any other album. Her voice was pure and operatic, with deeply affecting emotion, dipping occasionally into sadness and anger. (The 1990 tracks show her in less-than-great health, wobbling a bit.) She was also a superb pianist who wanted to…

Hargrove, trumpet; Miller, piano Resonance Records HCD-2060 (2CD)/HLP-9060 (2LP). 2021. Larry Clothier, Zev Feldman, prods.; Larry Clothier, Timothy Frey, George Klabin, Fran Gala, Bernie Grundman, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS This is a wonderful record, Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller playing trumpet-piano duets at two live concerts in 2006 and 2007. It has never been released before, which is odd, as it captures them in peak form and very good sound. Both musicians influenced many colleagues but left a spotty legacy among listeners, partly because they both died young (Miller at 58 in 2013, Hargrove at 49 in 2018) and partly because their albums were rarely as good as their live performances. Which makes this album all the more valuable. Hargrove dropped jaws when he arrived in New York at age 20,…

THIS ISSUE: Kurt Gottschalk is not a young man anymore. New York City is a dream you can’t have—glitz, glamor, grime, too much to take in from within, too much to understand from afar. It’s a metropolitan manifestation of the Heisenberg principle, its nature changing with how you look at it. No matter how you try, you can’t see the forest for the skyscrapers. Seen from the distance of my Illinois adolescence, New York was Woody Allen movies and Barney Miller reruns, intellectuals and petty criminals, the intoxicating and the incomprehensible. It was a rock’n’roll city, the rock’n’roll city, home of Kiss (my first love), then the Ramones, then later (for me) the Velvet Underground. Once I’d been funneled through the vortex of college and Chicago and spat out the…

SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should email the when, where, and who to stletters@stereo-phile.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the January 2021 issue is October 20, 2021. US: ORLANDO, FLORIDA, AND JAPAN: OSAKA Julie Mullins The story continues to evolve for Onkyo and its affiliated brands. Voxx International’s subsidiary Premium Audio Company, in partnership with Sharp Corporation, has acquired majority ownership of the Home Entertainment Division of Onkyo, which includes the Onkyo and Integra brands, which Voxx was already distributing. Sharp, which manufactures the products, reportedly has a 25% share of the deal; Premium Audio Company, which will handle global sales and distribution, will own the rest, according to a press release from Voxx. Distribution for the Onkyo and…

THIS ISSUE: Herb reviews an unusually powerful headphone amplifier that’s also intended for driving speakers. Today is Monday. Since Saturday, I have changed the amplifier driving my Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5a speakers three times—from the Parasound Halo A21+ (250Wpc into 8 ohms) to the Pass Labs XA25 (>25Wpc into 8 ohms) to the Elekit TU-8600S (9Wpc into 8 ohms). Now I am listening to the Falcons via the just-arrived RAAL-requisite HSA-1b headphone and speaker amp. This unusual, made-in-Serbia amplifier is priced at $4500. It’s specified to produce 10Wpc into 8 ohms, 20Wpc into 4 ohms, 40Wpc into 2 ohms, and 55Wpc into 1 ohm, these values from the loudspeaker output. Just before I installed the RAAL HSA-1b, I was playing an unusual EMI LP called Renaissance Suite featuring music for…

I tested the Cambridge Audio EVO 150 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1) then repeated some tests with the magazine’s more recent APx555 system. As the amplifier has an output stage operating in class-D, I inserted an Audio Precision auxiliary AUX-0025 passive low-pass filter between the test load and the Audio Precision analyzers. This filter eliminates RF noise that could drive their input circuitry into slew-rate limiting. I used it for all the loudspeaker output tests other than frequency response. After two hours of operation, the temperature of the amplifier’s top panel had stabilized at a slightly warm 94.1°F (34.5°C). I looked first at the Cambridge’s performance via its balanced and single-ended line inputs. The maximum gain at the loudspeaker outputs was…

On the face of it, playing and streaming digital music files is a straightforward process. You direct data from various sources—some local, some “in the cloud”—perhaps via a reclocker/signal conditioner to a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). “And the music comes out here.” Not so simple. Bits, it seems, aren’t bits, or not only. A digital datastream is also an analog signal. Noise and other signal errors endemic to multifunction computers not designed primarily for music playback can affect how music sounds. And then there are the practical issues of setting up and connecting everything optimally, and then organizing music files correctly, which can be especially difficult when ripping files from multidisc sets. These obstacles are why so many audiophiles have either switched to one-box music server solutions or even thrown up…

Adoption of DSP-based speaker-and-room correction in home theater—a parallel universe to audiophilia—is almost universal. It’s easy to understand why. Home theater matured in the digital age. Its fans were expected to install several loudspeakers in a full-range setup that included at least one speaker—the subwoofer(s)—that functioned exclusively in the problematic bass region. Setup issues were intimidating. Help quickly came in the form of setup utilities that required no knowledge of acoustics—only a willingness to position a microphone for a series of measurements and let the system do the rest. Audyssey was the first such utility to gain wide acceptance. Today, some arrive installed in AVRs and preamp-processors; others come as standalone devices or computer software. Most work well, providing precise level balance, compensating for unequal pathlength differences, and correcting in-room…

With Dirac implementations in AVRs or prepros, bass management has long been the responsibility of the host device; it was not included in Dirac—until now, or anyway, soon. Dirac Live Bass Control (DLBC) is an important new feature, providing bass management with potential to better integrate subwoofers with each other and with the main speakers. DLBC has already been implemented in a few AVRs, and Dirac sent me a beta version for Windows. I added three SVS subs—2 SB-3000s and an SB-2000 Pro—to create a 5.3 system. Because that configuration isn’t included in the current DL3 distribution, they sent along a config file. These brief comments, then, are based on beta software and an ad hoc configuration. With DLBC-enabled installation of Dirac Live 3, the menu on the right of…

Rhino R2 654105 / 603497844357 (3CD/1LP), 2021. Brendan O’Brien, prod.; Nick DiDia, Dan Hersch, engs. PERFORMANCE SONICS It’s never good to start an album with a throw-away instrumental, but that’s what Stone Temple Pilots did for their third, now a quarter-century old and receiving a deluxe reissue. There’s another problem: The third CD on this 3-CD package contains a 1997 live set from Panama City, Florida. The band tears through songs from their first two albums—Core and Purple—and also Tiny Music. The earlier tunes are better, which casts Tiny Music in a bad light. STP came out of the gate strong, quickly emerging as a hard-rock hit machine. That was sort of a curse for all the records that followed their first two. Tiny Music sold millions of copies and,…

Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano. Sono Luminus DSL-92251 (auditioned in 24/352.8 WAV). 2021. Dan Merceruio, prod.; Daniel Shores, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS What most distinguishes Northscape, beyond the stellar pianism of Lithuania-born Ieva Jokubaviciute and the excellence of this DXD capture, is the recording’s exploration of the intersection of external, internal, and interstellar landscapes. Journeys through forests, water, and inner and outer space intertwine in music that stretches the limits of the modern piano and enters uncharted realms. The contrast between the opening works, Lasse Thoresen’s Invocation of Pristine Light, Op.52, No.1 (2014) and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Scape (2011), sets the tone for the expedition. Thoresen’s piece—one of Four Invocations that simultaneously explore the physical elements and the realms of consciousness, spirit, soul, and body—abounds in glistening radiance. Thoresen, who takes his lead from…

Dmitry Baevsky, alto saxophone; Jeb Patton, piano; David Wong, bass; Pete Van Nostrand, drums Fresh Sound New Talent FSNT 618 (CD). 2021. Dmitry Baevsky, prod.; Tom Tedesco, eng. PERFORMANCE SONICS How time slips away. Dmitry Baevsky, that enfant terrible of the alto saxophone, is now 45. The CD booklet for his ninth album contains a condensed, touching autobiography. Baevsky was born in St. Petersburg, entered the Mussorgsky College of Music at 15, and lived through the exciting, grueling aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. He came to New York at 19 to attend a two-week workshop and stayed 20 years. He now lives in Paris with his French wife and child. Soundtrack is the musical score to his life story. It contains Russian and American and French popular…

THIS ISSUE: Classic hi-fi repair technicians—and parts—are in high demand and low supply. Lately I’ve been hearing stories about people getting back into hi-fi, often from the people themselves. Some are buying new gear, but others have dug out and dusted off older equipment. Demand for electronics repair services was surging even before the pandemic. Once it struck, once and future audiophiles stuck at home plumbed their basements, attics, and storage units and pulled out old hi-fi components, hoping to resurrect them, only to find they weren’t working, or not well. Should they get ’em fixed? There’s much to consider: The type, age, quality, and condition of the component, how it was stored, how much you’re willing to spend to restore it, and how much patience you have. Repairs may…