Innehållsförteckning för August 2023 från Stereophile

Creating a new flagship model is never an easy task for an audio company. A good designer will have already incorporated all his or her best ideas into the prior flagship. For a follow-up, you typically get a scaled-up version of what came before, incorporating the kind of improvements a bigger budget will allow. SME’s history is well-documented. The company started out, in 1946, as an engineering company for hire. In 1959, after a few years supplying parts for the scale modeling and various other high-tech industries, company founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman wanted a better tonearm for his personal use. He leveraged the capabilities of his small engineering company to create what eventually became the legendary 3009 and 3012 tonearms. The reputation of the new arms spread quickly, and from the…

Stereophile writers and website commentors often speak to the topic of the ongoing rise in retail pricing at the upper levels of the hi-fi market. Companies producing cost-no-object designs make regular appearances in the hardware reviews published here. However, a countervailing vector is also at play in the consumer hi-fi sector: a trend toward bringing to market products that are smaller and more economical than the competition while offering an ever-increasing variety of features and continually improved performance, notably in terms of measurable specifications. This dialectic can sometimes play out within the same company. Abbingdon Music Research (AMR), which is based in Southport, UK, was founded in 2000. At first, under the AMR brand, the company focused on high-end audio component separates with price points toward the upper end of…

The last time I had to box up my roughly 2600 records, during a move, I cursed up a storm and drank almost an entire bottle of tequila. I struggled to keep the vinyl alphabetized and kept running out of boxes, markers, and tape. And I discovered that I had more LPs of music by Miles Davis and Bach than by anyone else. In third place was George Jones. The vectors of tradition, originality, and talent came together in Jones to produce a strange and unlikely gift. His music can make you feel things as suddenly and deeply as just about anyone’s, but on top of this Jones had the greatest instrument of any male vocalist in country music, almost outlandish in its range and power. Then there was his…

When my wife and I got engaged, we each bought each other a “bubble-back” Rolex watch from an antique shop in San Francisco. Mine was a 1939, hers was a 1940; both watches still run fine, though I am not sure for how much longer, as Rolex no longer services watches that old. My respect for Swiss engineering is based in part on my experience with the Rolexes. So I readily agreed when Editor-in-Chief Jim Austin proposed that I spend some time with the current version of the I1 Universal integrated amplifier from Swiss company CH Precision.1 Jason Victor Serinus reviewed the modular, class-AB I1 Universal, which is currently priced at $38,000–$53,000, depending on options, and offers an output power of 100Wpc into 8 ohms, in February 2019.2 The basic…

Audio engineers never get the credit they deserve. The same is true for music arrangers, who are also an unheralded but hugely fundamental part of any musical success. As a composer, conductor, and inventive arranger of popular music, the modest but multitalented Vince Mendoza says he’s most focused on enhancing the song he is arranging and the story it is trying to tell. “Young arrangers are very concerned with their own voice and spinning their own melodies and turning things upside down and backwards, and they forget what a song really is about,” he told me in a recent Zoom conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “You could be writing about heartbreak, and there are a million and one ways to tell that story, but the listener still has…

I view poetry as more than a literary genre. It’s a worldview and a state of being that frames my daily experience in the supernal. I’ve consumed a lifetime keeping my senses peeled for authentic, manmade mysteries, especially in art and music. Music is my favorite hunting ground, and nowhere have I found mysteries as DNA-deep as the 59 takes of 29 songs recorded in only five days by Delta blues legend Robert Johnson (1911–1938). I’ve played the Columbia Records 1961 anthology King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia LP CL 1654) 100 times since my days in Chicago as a teenager, and I still haven’t grasped more than a portion of its juke-joint poetics. Robert Johnson’s lyrics, to songs like “If I Had Possession over Judgment Day” and “Crossroads,”…

Due to the Raidho TD3.8’s bulk, I wasn’t able to bring it up the stairs from the driveway to our living room, where I usually measure loudspeakers. I therefore measured the speaker in the driveway, keeping its front baffle turned away from the sun so the drive units would stay cool. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system with a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the loudspeaker’s behavior in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. It wasn’t possible to raise the 183lb TD3.8 off the ground for the measurements, so the first reflection from the ground occurs earlier than is usually the case with my measurements. Raidho specifies the TD3.8’s specified sensitivity as 89dB/2.83V/m. My B-weighted estimate was somewhat lower, at 86.5dB(B)/2.83V/m. The TD3.8’s nominal…

Speed stability has been a given with previous SME turntables, but the switch from DC to AC motor drive has taken its Model 60 to another level. Its ~0.005% absolute speed accuracy and mere 0.01% peak-weighted wow (fig.1) are comparable with the best of today’s direct-drive offerings, including Technics’s fabulous Grand Class SL-1200GAE. Few other belt-drive decks get this close. Minor flutter modes at ±12Hz, ±33Hz, and ±65Hz (also visible on the unweighted rumble spectra, fig.2) amount to no more than a peak-weighted 0.02%. Furthermore, the sintered bronze bearing, with its oil-damped ball, is so precisely machined and polished that both through-groove and through-bearing rumble are truly state of the art, at – 75.5dB and – 76.5dB (DIN-B–weighted, ref. 5cm/s), respectively. The impact of the screw-down record weight/clamp is limited…

I measured the iFi NEO Stream using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 Out of the box, the review sample was running firmware version 2.15.8. When I connected the iFi to my router with a CAT5 cable either directly or via iFi’s optical Ethernet converter, Roon recognized it both as an AirPlay device and as a hard-wired Roon Ready streamer. To control playback, I installed the iFi app on my iPad and also opened the iFi.local webpage on my computer. However, when I tried to play a file from Roon with either the app or with the webpage, it would stop after a couple of seconds, displaying the message “Failed to open ALSA Device … no such file or directory.” I rebooted the router and my Roon Nucleus+, did a factory…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system with a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Acelec Model One’s behavior in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. I measured the speaker’s impedance magnitude and phase with Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system. The Model One’s specified sensitivity is 84dB/W/m; my B-weighted estimate was within experimental error of that figure, at 84.1dB(B)/2.83V/m. The Model One’s nominal impedance is specified as 8 ohms, with a minimum value of 5 ohms at 375Hz. The speaker’s impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) remains between 5 and 8 ohms for most of the audioband but drops to 4.78 ohms at 380Hz. The electrical phase angle (dotted trace) is generally low, but the equivalent peak dissipation resistance, or EPDR,1 lies below 3 ohms between…

I performed the measurements of the Fezz Audio Silver Luna Prestige amplifier with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 confirming some of the results with the higher-performance APx500. I carefully installed the tubes, following the numbered guide that had been packed with the amplifier. I carried out a complete set of tests with the 12AX7 tubes that AH had told me he preferred, with the output stage in both pentode and tetrode modes. I then repeated some of the testing with the alternative 6N2P small-signal tubes. I powered down the amplifier before changing the output modes or operating the input tube switch on the top panel. The 6N2P is not pin-compatible with the 12AX7; I assume the switch changes the internal connections. As usual, I waited for an hour after powering…

The grandest perk of being a reviewer is when sniffing through the grass leads me to a high-performance product capable of wide-ranging appeal at a price point that shouldn’t scare anyone. In my sniffing, I have encountered a few products of this type, whose success I’ve applauded because it is so much fun to see legions of happy audiophiles united in their approval of a product so unusual that they may not have considered it had it not been ardently championed in the audiophile press. Klipsch’s popular flagship standmount, the Reference Premiere RP-600M, is exactly that kind of product, one that I am proud to have championed when it first came out. In my March 2019 review I used descriptors like “responsive,” “boogie,” and “high-vitality.”9 I observed how the RP-600M…

A DEAL FOR AUDIO RESEARCH AWAITS APPROVAL Jim Austin As Stereophile reported in our July issue, in late April Audio Research filed for “assignment for the benefit of creditors,” a form of receivership. “Assignment,” in its most intensive form, means signing over all assets to a third party for eventual distributon to creditors. During the last few days of May, new court documents appeared online suggesting that ARC had been sold, pending only court approval. The selling price: $1,088,888.18, for all Audio Research assets except cash and bank accounts. Together with that cash and those accounts, the sale amount is expected to compensate all secured creditors in full and “possibly provide a modest distribution to unsecured creditors.” It was a popular sale. According to the court documents, 17 parties expressed…

May has long been one of my favorite months of the year, mostly because it means it’s time for the Munich show, the annual gathering of the high-end audio tribe in the Bavarian capital. High End Munich 2023 marked my return to the biggest audio show in the Western world following three years of lockdowns and travel restrictions, so I was eager to get back to the land of Wiener schnitzel and bratwurst. This year, as an added bonus, I was invited to visit the production facilities of turntable and tonearm manufacturer Acoustic Signature, which is based about 110 miles west of Munich, near Stuttgart. Acoustic Signature factory visit One day prior to High End Munich’s opening, I traveled with a group of dealers, distributors, and fellow hi-fi scribblers west…

Little Feat’s beginning was a slow burn, bolstered by the faith of record company execs as the band found its groove. Once it found its, um, feat, the band thrived through deaths and other turmoil. In fact, they’re still at it. This fall, according to Rhino Records, the band will be performing “on back-to-back nights … at selected venues” the two albums that document the time they found their way: 1972’s Sailin’ Shoes and 1973’s Dixie Chicken. In conjunction with that 50th anniversary mini-tour, Rhino has issued deluxe remasters of both albums on 3 LPs or 2 CDs, with plenty of bonus material and a previously unissued live show with each album. On the LP sets, the two original albums were remastered by Bernie Grundman “from the flat master tapes,”…

Those who, like me, hauled ourselves through college music courses will remember being told that the Byrd Mass for five voices is a masterpiece, a claim soon belied when we were played a performance by some desiccated, monochromatic chorus. Had a recording like the new one by The Gesualdo Six been played instead, we might have agreed more readily with the academic judgment. Simply by singing firmly and attending to the texts, these six male singers transform the Mass, here interspersed with a selection of appropriate choral antiphons, into vibrant, communicative scores. They accomplish this without violating today’s norms of Renaissance style. The use of just one voice on a part, which harks back to Joshua Rifkin’s pioneering practice in Bach choral works, could sound threadbare or even counterproductively economical.…

“I hope you’re decompressing from AXPONA,” I recently wrote to a frazzled-looking friend I’d met at this greatest of North American hi-fi shows. Google’s spellcheck offered to change decompressing to decomposing. I declined, though it’s true that such expos can be grueling—just not grueling enough to stay away. In these observations about high-end audio shows, fondness is foremost, but a few dark side notes will slip in. 1. EVERYBODY THERE IS CRAZY—IN A GOOD WAY. In the real world, do people slap you on the back when they learn that you’re about to spend the equivalent of a Tesla on a hi-fi system? Unlikely. They may slap you across the face instead, trying to bring you back to your senses. One of the rewards of being at audio shows is…