Innehållsförteckning för January 2024 från Stereophile

Dispelling a myth(?) about phono-cartridge loading In the midst of his December Gramophone Dreams column, Herb Reichert presented the results of an experiment. He was listening to the most recent version of Zu Audio’s Denon DL-103, installed on his new-old Lenco. He hooked it up to the moving coil input of his SunValley SV-EQ1616D’s phono preamp, which apparently is intended for use with low-output MC cartridges since it loads them down with a 50 ohm shunt resistor—a heavy load for all but the lowest-impedance MCs. The rough rule of thumb for loading an MC cartridge, as many readers are aware, is that the load resistance should exceed the cartridge’s internal impedance by about a factor of 10. As MC cartridges go, the DL-103 has a high source impedance, around 40…

The MasterPhono from Mobile Fidelity Electronics During my cub reporter days at Stereophile, I was always on the lookout, casting about for midlevel analog components I might latch on to, ones that could join my long-term daily-driver reference system by complementing the character of my midlevel DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/93 and Falcon LS3/5a loudspeakers. I was searching for these basic traits: alive and vigorous, clear and well-sorted, relaxed and natural. One of my first-ever Stereophile reviews, in the October 2014 issue, was of Sentec’s EQ11 phono preamplifier, which featured six EQ choices, selectable from the front panel, Bakelite knobs, Switchcraft switches, and a gray Hammerite-paint finish. When I reviewed the Sentec, I owned three turntables and about 300 records. But phono stage–wise, I was a beggar and a borrower, hoping…

AS HAPPY MOMENTS IN ONE’S LIFE GO, this one was supposed to be up there: the time I first heard my stereo rig in the new, custom-built listening room in the back of my home. It had taken eight months to get to this point, starting with gutting the garage and rebuilding the floor and walls. (We kept the roof.) By the end, all-new doors and windows had been hung and treated with acoustical sealant. Extrathick drywall and mass-loaded vinyl were installed for better sound insulation. A dedicated power line was brought in. Credit where due: The new room was my wife’s win-win suggestion. For a few years, I’d performed my reviewing duties in our living room, a good-sounding space that nonetheless had three problems. A variety of stereo gear…

I’ve been running a 5.1 system for years. Recently, I expanded it to 5.3 with the addition of two more subwoofers. This system is manageable with one of my eight-channel DACs. Even more recently, I dipped my toe into Dolby Atmos, which made it necessary to lash up at least four more channels.1 That was a big problem, since neither JRiver nor Roon can support and sync more than one output device at a time, and the multichannel DACs I already owned tap out at eight channels. I turned to the Arvus H2-4D Renderer, which offers 16 channels of digital output over AES3 and 16 channels of balanced-analog output. This worked, but piping everything through the Arvus meant forswearing DSP, including DiracLive. I really needed a DAC with at least…

The first Beatles music is more than 60 years old, and the group broke up 53 years ago. Yet they and their music remain relevant. So when Apple Corps announced “The Last Beatles Song,” on October 26, the world’s media ran with the story.1 Beatles fans span at least four generations, and the group’s promotion machine is looking to hook today’s youth, and perhaps rekindle old flames, with 50th Anniversary deluxe reissues of the “Red” (1962-1966) and “Blue” (1967-1970) compilations. These expanded editions—12 new tracks on Red and nine on Blue, including the new-old single “Now & Then”—sport remixes performed since 2015. The most recent prior reissues of Red and Blue were in 2010, using the 2009 transfers of The Beatles’ original master tapes. They were first issued on CD…

Mobile Fidelity Electronics MasterPhono Following a hugely successful AXPONA 2023 show, we were elated when Herb Reichert requested a MoFi MasterPhono for his Gramophone Dreams column. What could be better than a master storyteller like HR getting his hands on MoFi Electronics’s new statement product? The Master-Phono is a highly complex component that requires patience to fully comprehend and “dial in” to achieve maximum performance from one’s phono cartridge(s), which makes it perfect for the Gramophone Dreams column. We would like to take this opportunity to further clarify a few aspects of HR’s excellent and thorough editorial. The included, sculpted-aluminum remote control does indeed do a whole lot more than turn the meter lights on and off. Adjustments to cartridge loading, gain, mode (Stereo/Mono), and subsonic filtering are all facilitated…

Realizing the analog you “The phonograph record is an art form itself,” Lester Koenig wrote in March 1959, “and one of its advantages is the performance that exists uniquely of, by and for the record.” Remarkably, when Koenig included this pronouncement in his liner notes to Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders, the 12" long-play record had been the dominant carrier of recorded music for less than a decade, and stereo discs had been mass produced for just over a year. For Koenig, this issue wasn’t merely academic. Before making his name as head of Contemporary Records in Los Angeles, he had attended Yale Law School, worked as a screenwriter and producer at Paramount, and gotten blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At Contemporary, he set out to…

When I was offered the opportunity to review a Burmester product—the 216 stereo power amplifier—I accepted immediately, mainly out of curiosity. Berlin-based Burmester is an important hi-fi brand, but I knew very little about the company and their products. What better way to learn more than to review one of their products? Burmester’s creation story When you’re building a hi-fi system, there’s something right about starting with the preamp. It just makes sense. It’s what Dieter Burmester did in building a hi-fi company. The preamplifier is the operational hub of any hi-fi system (not counting systems that don’t have a preamplifier), but that doesn’t fully capture the preamp’s import. The preamp is the brain but also the brainstem, the spinal cord, possibly the heart. Its impact on a system’s sound…

Sometimes I think expensive components—I’ll let you decide what constitutes expensive—should come with a big red sticker on the box that reads “WARNING! This product will probably not meet your expectations!” That’s because when you spend a lot of money on something, you expect that something to have no flaws and to sound nigh perfect. Why else would you have paid so much? As you gaze at it, touch it, and listen to it, it constantly reassures you that you made the right decision by picking it over all the other, less pricey candidates. It has to be unambiguously better than any component of its nature that has passed through your system, or else, what was the point in all that upgrading? That’s a lot of expectations for a product…

THERE’S ONLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC: THE BLUES AND ZIPPETY DOO-DAH.—TOWNES VAN ZANDT Having just finished this review of The Replacements’ Tim: Let It Bleed Edition, I thought I’d glance at a couple of online forums to see what the collective verdict was on the sound quality of the set’s main attraction: a remix of the album by Ramones engineer Ed Stasium. At Steve Hoffman’s forums, I saw this in one of the first posts: “It sounded like I expected Tim to sound when it came out in the fall of 1985. I’ve also listened to the newly remastered original album that comes with the set, and while it sounds good and I’m glad to have it, it pales compared to the 2023 Stasium mix.” Ticking down a post or…

Auditioned with the bloody conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as a backdrop, these riveting, superbly recorded performances confront listeners with the inescapable ravages of war. They also open a window on the shifting political convictions of one of the greatest composers to emerge during the early years of the Soviet Republic, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. The premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.2 in B major, Op.14, “To October,” took place toward the end of 1927, soon after his 21st birthday. A celebration of the 1917 Russian Revolution, it and the Third Symphony, whose premiere followed a little more than two years later, reflect Shostakovich’s belief in Sovietstyle Communism. The Second is wild, brash, experimental, and an embodiment of the ideology the composer then felt essential to music. It assaults us…

GOOD AND BAD, I DEFINE THESE TERMS QUITE CLEAR…—BOB DYLAN In Gramophone Dream #79, I described how my mother started me on a path where I am compelled to look and touch and listen and read my way to “good taste in everything.” “Books and manners,” she called it. She viewed these social proficiencies as something people put on like clothes. But for me, taste has a deeper significance. I see it as regulated by an internalized moral and socio-spiritual code that forces me to recognize how little I know about whatever subject I am judging. With fine art and music, that code compels me to ask myself why I prefer one artist, style, or genre to another. This why-oriented introspection is important because when I take this type of…

The Wand 14-4 turntable, and a visit to SME In prior screeds, I have discussed the category of turntable designers I like to call deep thinkers, who twist their brains to come up with fresh thinking about how to approach the task of playing a vinyl record. If there is a poster boy for deep thinkers, it’s got to be Simon Brown. Brown is based on the South Island of New Zealand. I’m thinking that being in such a far-flung part of the world must have given his head plenty of space to get creative. First, in 2011 he created The Wand tonearm, a striking unipivot design that features a fat carbon-fiber armtube nearly 1" in diameter. Art Dudley wrote about The Wand in 2019,1 and I highly recommend that…

The Burmester 216 can be operated as a conventional two-channel amplifier or, by bridging the two output stages using the supplied adapter cable, as a monoblock. I performed a complete set of measurements in both modes on one of the review samples (serial number 9216060) with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 I preconditioned the 216 by following the CEA’s recommendation of running it in stereo mode at one-eighth the specified power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, the temperature of the top panel was 96.4°F (35.8°C) and that of the side panels 110.2°F (43.4°C). The diagram on the amplifier’s rear panel indicates that the balanced inputs are wired with pin 2 negative, the opposite of the AES standard. Consequently, the Burmester inverted absolute polarity…

Naim has comprehensively reimagined its Classic Series, which has been around for some 20 years with improvements along the way. Included in the new range of products is the 200 series, comprised of two products: the NAP 250 power amplifier, which I reviewed in the November issue of Stereophile,1 and the NSC 222 streaming preamplifier ($8999), which is reviewed here. A third component in the New Classic series, the NPX 300 power supply (also $8999), which is intended to be paired with the NSC 222 and other Naim components, is also considered in this review. In brief, the NSC 222 is a line preamplifier sporting a precision, microprocessor-controlled, click-free, 100-step discrete-resistor volume stage, a medium-sensitivity moving magnet phono preamplifier, a comprehensive streamer/DAC that can be controlled with the matching Naim…

I measured a different sample of the Leak Stereo 230, serial number LH000805CFD1195, than the one RS had auditioned. I performed the measurements using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 I preconditioned the Stereo 230 by following the CEA’s recommendation of running it at one-eighth the specified power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, the black grille on the amplifier’s top panel was hot, at 118.1°F/47.9°C. Looking first at the amplifier’s behavior with its single-ended analog line input, with the Leak’s volume control set to its maximum the voltage gain at 1kHz into 8 ohms measured 32.7dB from the speaker terminals, 0.6dB from the preamplifier output, and 10.37dB from the headphone output. The line input preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting) from both output types, and…

When Jim Austin offered the Plinius Reference A-150 stereo amplifier ($14,995) for review, it felt like a welcome blast from the past. Plinius has, lately, maintained a low profile in the US, likely due to several changes in US distributorship. When was the last time I’d encountered a Plinius product? I found no talk of the 40-year-old New Zealand brand between a brief mention in a 2015 column by John Marks1 and 2022, when Robert Schryer spied a Plinius component at the Montréal Audio Fest.2 The most recent Stereophile review of a Plinius component was Erick Lichte’s 2011 take on the SA-103 power amplifier,3 in which he concluded, “The Plinius SA-103 offers a natural, neutral tonal balance, just the right amount of musicality, superb bass performance, plenty of current to…

In the 1970s, Steely Dan produced hit records for a listening public that could care less about the band’s cryptic lyrics. Those early Dan fans responded to their songs’ epic choruses and glistening hooks, awarding chart-topping success and a global audience. From 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill to 1980’s closing act Gaucho, Bard sages Walter Becker (1950–2017) and Donald Fagen occupied a place in pop music as unique as their songs’ references to “wild gamblers,” “midnight cruisers,” “bodacious cowboys,” and a female protagonist who “prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire.” Much later, Becker and Fagen returned to the studio, issuing Two Against Nature to an audience still hungry for their singular R&B- and jazz-based music. Music Matters founder Ron Rambach told me years ago, in an interview…