Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-14 i Stereophile

Way back when, I met this maenad woman at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village and told her I was an artist. She told me she was an art collector and invited me to her loft to see her collection. While she was showing me an impressive assortment of African and contemporary art, she was dropping names: William Burroughs, Bob Marley, John Cage, etc. Hmmm . . . really? I spoke up. “Oh, I love John Cage. What was he like?” She told me that Cage picked her up one day to go to an art party in the Hamptons. When they arrived, he said he needed her help putting batteries in a box full of transistor radios. As they walked to the party, he instructed her to tune the radios…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website devoted to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@vcable.us. 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, February 23, 2–5pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Scott Walker Audio (1215 N. Tustin Avenue, Anaheim). The demo will feature the latest products from McIntosh Laboratory, including the C2500 tube preamplifier, MT5 turntable, MAC6700 receiver, McAire audio system, and D100 digital preamp–DAC. Cables and power-line accessories will be provided by Synergistic Research, and representatives of McIntosh and Synergistic…

In his article on the future of audio engineering (p.54), John La Grou tells us—succinctly and correctly, I think—that we are rapidly moving from a culture of handheld devices to one of headworn devices. He postulates that by perhaps as early as 2025, rather than being actively sought out, most audio/video media will be delivered, like milk or the newspaper—but delivered not to our front doors, but more or less straight to our brains. Fascinating? Sure. Frightening? Kinda, yeah. I’m just getting used to Instagram (@stephenmejias), and now I have to prepare for InstaEverything—in my brain, no less. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve been wasting money on all my new LPs—turntables will still be around in 2025, I hope—but it’s a simple fact of modern life that more people…

AS SONGWRITERS GO, GUY CLARK has been touched by the muse more than most. Unfortunately, in recent years he’s also been visited by illness and heartache. In June 2012, his wife of 40 years, Susanna Clark, who was both a songwriter (“Easy from Now On”) and an artist (the cover of Willie Nelson’s Stardust), died in Nashville. In the past several years Clark, 72, has battled lymphoma, had his knees replaced, and undergone an arterial replacement in one leg. He was being treated for skin cancer when I visited his home, south of Nashville, in October 2013. Earlier that year, despite or perhaps because of these troubles, Clark wrote and recorded one of his best albums, My Favorite Picture of You, which has since been nominated for a Grammy Award…

Most folks don’t even know they exist, but the Channel Islands are a chain of eight moderately sized mountains poking through the Pacific Ocean along the coast of southern California, between Santa Barbara and San Diego. The most famous of these is Catalina Island and its city, Avalon, which sit opposite San Clemente. The other Channel Islands are relatively wild and have been preserved mostly uninhabited. On the mainland across from these isles, in Port Hueneme, is Channel Islands Audio (aka CIAudio), a company of modest size that’s been around for 17 years and makes compact power amps, preamplifiers, and digital/analog converters. Like the islands, always sitting quietly off the coast but barely seen, CIAudio had always been in the periphery of my audio world, though I knew little about…

I got comfortable in the center chair. I was visiting British manufacturer Arcam in their new facility, a few miles north of Cambridge, and product manager Andy Moore had set up a modestly priced but potentially good-sounding system in the company’s dedicated listening room: KEF R300 speakers driven by the Arcam FMJ A19 integrated amplifier, which had impressed Stephen Mejias in the January issue. The source appeared to be Arcam’s FMJ D33 D/A processor, which I reviewed in February 2013, connected by USB to a laptop running JRiver Media Center. I closed my eyes, and Moore played a track from the soundtrack to one of the Batman movies. The soundstage was wide and deep, and the orchestral sound was detailed and uncolored. This was an unfamiliar room, system and recording,…

In most of this country, March Madness is slang for the NCAA basketball championships. But in New York City, insanity in March means the Allman Brothers Band’s annual residency at the Beacon Theater, on the Upper West Side. In 2014, the band’s March shows have been preceded by a flurry of activity around their catalog of recordings, including: a new batch of vinyl reissues from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab; a new LP reissue of Brothers and Sisters, from Universal Music; a new book, Please Be With Me, by Duane’s daughter, Galadrielle Allman; and the new Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective, the acclaimed, seven-CD boxed set of her father’s music, coproduced by Galadrielle. In addition, Haynes and his band, Gov’t Mule, have released Shout!, their first album for Blue Note, which…

The SOFA Editor: I think it is high time (in these ever so politically correct times) that the term “Wife Acceptance Factor” be put out to pasture. This expression is discriminatory by both gender and marital status. As a less offensive alternative, I suggest “Significant Other Factor of Acceptance,” or SOFA.—Brian Remington blremington@verizon.net An unforgivable omission Editor: In his Jadis I-35 review (January 2014), Art Dudley omitted James Jamerson, perhaps the greatest musician to ever perform in popular music, from his enumeration of the seminal electric bassists of the 1960s. Jamerson’s virtuosic musicality needs to be honored, particularly in a magazine like Stereophile, which introduced musician credits into audio reviewing. Have a fresh listen to “Bernadette” by the Four Tops and “I Was Made to Love Her” by Stevie Wonder—Jamerson…

Is the high-performance audio industry stagnating? Are designers simply repackaging the past? Cynics claim so, but to me it seems that making that case gets harder by the day, as a parade of veterans continue to produce their best work. I’m talking Dan D’Agostino’s Momentum power amps and preamp, Dave Wilson’s XLF and Alexia loudspeakers, Jeff Nelson’s Boulder 3050 monoblocks, and the seasoned pros who produce Constellation electronics: John Curl, Bascom King, Peter Madnick, and Demian Martin. Harry Weisfeld’s new VPI Classic direct-drive turntable with its JMW Memorial 3D-printed tonearm is another obvious example of an audio veteran raising the bar; yet another is Roy Gandy and his Rega Research team’s RP8 turntable. The latest Lyra cartridges, designed by Jonathan Carr, raise more bars: the Atlas, introduced in 2012, and…

After going so far off the beaten path in my last column, with examinations of digital signal processing (DSP) from miniDSP and Illusonic and multichannel in-room measurements, this month I take a look at and listen to a new preamplifier-processor from Yamaha, along with its companion multichannel power amplifier. The Japanese company was a pioneer in DSP and multichannel sound, but for a long while now has been swimming in the mainstream of audi Yamaha Aventage CX-A5000 preamplifier-processor When I saw the first notices of the Aventage CX-A5000 11.2-channel pre-pro, I was first struck by its price of $2999.95, which seemed to indicate that Yamaha was making a bold bid for leadership in the under-$5000 category. Further examination revealed that the CX-A5000 retains all the hometheater features of their audio/video…

HEADPHONES I well remember my first “real” headphones: a pair of Koss Pro4AAs that I bought back in 1970. The Kosses were relatively expensive, but, like headphones today, they allowed an audiophile with limited cash to get a taste of high-end sound that was not possible with a speaker-based system. I bought the Pro4AAs because I had become fascinated with how the images of the instruments and singers were strung along a line between my ears inside my head. It seemed so much more intimate—a more direct connection with the music—than playback through loudspeakers. And in those early days of recording rock music in stereo, engineers were doing crazy things like panning instruments from side to side, and more—toward the end of “For Haven’s Sake,” from Richie Havens’s 1969 album…

Back in the summer of 2009, USB-connected D/A processors that could operate at sample rates greater than 48kHz were rare. Ayre Acoustics had just released its groundbreaking QB-9, one of the first DACs to use Gordon Rankin’s Streamlength code for Texas Instruments’ TAS1020 USB 1.1 receiver chip. Streamlength allowed the chip to operate in the sonically beneficial asynchronous mode, where the PC sourcing the audio data is slaved to the DAC. But high-performance, USB-connected DACs like the Ayre were also relatively expensive back then, so in the January 2010 issue of Stereophile I reviewed a pair of soundcards from major computer manufacturer ASUS,1 the Xonar Essence ST and STX, which, at $200, offered a much more cost-effective means of playing hi-rez files on a PC. I was impressed by what…

Keith Jarrett’s gift for brilliant invention is apparently inexhaustible throughout both of these concerts, recorded five days apart in spring 1981. The combinations of lyricism, literally foot-stomping gospel, chordings and voicings alternately sumptuously lush and astringently lean, and unexpected musical destinations reached in surprising ways, are here at least as rich as anything else he’s done. In trying to describe Jarrett’s concert-length solo improvisations, the temptation to play the reviewer’s game of “Sounds Like . . .” is irresistible. Bregenz, Part I, begins by modulating through two Sundays’ worth of Protestant hymns, then continues through a Beethovenian scherzo diabolique to massive chords in a blocky structure all Jarrett’s own, to a lonely Hebrew folksong, to Debussyan pastels, then a working-through of ostinato rightangled modulations that move into the piano’s interior,…

US: NEWSSTANDS EVERYWHERE Ariel Bitran Throughout 2013, we received letters from readers who wondered, “Where is the Stereophile Buyer’s Guide?” This ever-popular, newsstands-only issue was put on hold for 2013 so that we could provide you with the Stereophile Recommended Components Collector’s Edition, a sumptuous archive of the past 10 years’ worth of Recommended Components. This year, our team returns with the 2014 Stereophile Buyer’s Guide, an encyclopedic listing of two-channel audio components currently available for purchase. The Guide’s product categories range from power amps to preamps, from turntables to digital players. Included specifications range from the universally useful, such as input types for preamps or dimensions for loudspeakers, to minutiae, such as the various overload margins of a phono preamp, or whether a subwoofer has an LFE input. All…

In the wake of my October 2013 “Listening” column and its negative take on the Pete Riggle Woody tonearm,1 I was surprised and gratified by the offer of another new arm: a gesture of trust not unlike sending one’s children to a sleepover at Casey Anthony’s house. The supplier was Phillip Holmes, of Texas-based Mockingbird Distribution, and the new tonearm was the Abis SA-1, the design and manufacture of which was commissioned by the Japanese firm Sibatech, itself a distributor of dozens of highend audio brands, including Zyx, Mactone, Zerodust, and, perhaps most famously, Kondo. In contrast to the artisanal and altogether wooden Woody, the Abis SA-1 ($2350) is machined from aluminum alloy and assembled in a Tokyo factory that, I’m told, has 40 years of experience making tonearms under…

By 2035, the way we produce and consume media will be entirely different from how we experience it now. Today there is still a “fourth wall” between us and the media we consume: within three decades, that line between reality and its recreation will all but disappear. Our media experiences will become fully immersive—from spherical audio and video that tracks with our body’s movements, to gestural computing, to physical-feedback devices, and more. Using tomorrow’s technology, our children and grandchildren may find it difficult to distinguish the real thing from reproduced. Technology Improvements Follow a Trend Fifty years ago, people thought Alan Turing was crazy. The father of algorithmic computing, Turing predicted that computers would employ about one gigabit (1GB) of data storage by the turn of the century.1 He was…

LOUDSPEAKER I know someone who bought, for his own kitchen, a stove intended for the restaurant trade, simply because it enhances his enjoyment of cooking. Another friend, a motoring enthusiast, has equipped his garage with a brace of tools, including a hydraulic lift, that would be the envy of some humbler repair shops. Yet another friend indulges her enthusiasm for ceramics with a potter’s wheel and kiln that one might find in a well-endowed art school. Among the most serious consumers, it seems, the watchword is professional; odd, then, that professional-quality monitors don’t account for an even bigger chunk of the domestic loudspeaker market. They’ve had their day, of course—especially such smaller monitors as the BBC-designed LS3/5a. But today, one wonders if their relatively spartan, homely cosmetics have augured against…

After I reviewed the Astell&Kern AK100 portable media player, 1 in August 2013 (www.stereophile.com/content/astellampkern-ak100-portable-media-player), rather than return the review sample to A&K, I bought it. Yes, I very much liked what this little gem of a player did—much as I appreciate how much music I can store on my 160GB iPod, it sounds harsh and lacking in detail compared with the AK100. However, one thing the iPod does that the AK100 didn’t was support gapless file playback, which is essential for such works as through-composed operas and symphonies, or even albums like Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, where there is no pause between movements. Astell&Kern addressed this omission in June 2013 with the release of the v.2.01 firmware. This is supplied as a binary hex file that you copy into…

THIS ISSUE: Mockingbird Distribution and Channel Islands Audio comment on our reviews of their products. Abis SA-1 Editor: I want to thank Art Dudley for his concise review of the Abis SA-1 tonearm. I am mostly in agreement with his findings, and where I differ, it’s due to the choice of different cartridges, tonearm cables, etc. As Art mentions in the review, the SA-1 is a brand-new design, and we were missing some technical information at the deadline. I didn’t even check this particular arm before sending it out. It went from Japan to Texas to Art in six days. By the time the review is published, we will have the tonearm’s mass. The manufacturer believes the mass to be 20gm, but we will have a precise number in a…