Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Stereophile

I’m at Dan D’Agostino’s house listening to his triamped Apogee full-range ribbon speakers. It’s 1985. His listening room is immense, easily 30' by 45', and we’re rocking out to Led Zeppelin and Bonzo Dog Band records. The sound is light-years better than anything I’ve heard—dynamic as hell, beyond vivid, and the soundstage has infinite depth—and Dan’s obviously loving that I’m blown away by his system. We get to talking. He has three pairs of Krell KMA-160 monoblocks and Reference KRS preamps for me. Thanks, I say, but how can I get them home? No problem—Dan has a van. We gingerly put the Krells on dollies and roll them, sliding, bumping, and grinding, down his long gravel driveway to a shiny black Dodge van. The second we open the van’s rear…

Keith Aschenbrenner, proprietor of Auditorium 23, based in Frankfurt, Germany, has long been associated with the people and products of Shindo Laboratory: From the early 1990s until the EU’s 2006 implementation of the RoHS 1 regulation, which banned the sale of various old-style electrolytic materials— and thus most of Shindo’s products—Auditorium 23 was the brand’s European distributor and, arguably, one of its most empathetic and enthusiastic retailers worldwide. Throughout that time, and continuing through to today, Aschenbrenner has also worked as a designer and manufacturer of Shindo-friendly ancillaries and loudspeakers. Those speakers have included some popular models, such as Auditorium 23’s Rondo and Solovox models, both built around full-range drivers from the French company Phy-HP. Yet Aschenbrenner—who, for years, listened at home to a pair of vintage Western Electric 555…

Iperformed a full set of measurements on the PrimaLuna Pro-Logue Premium power amplifier, using both my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/measurements-mapsprecision) and my vintage Audio Precision System One. As I did so, I got a strong feeling of déjà vu: the amplifier’s behavior was similar in many respects to that of the ProLogue Premium integrated amplifier, which Robert Deutsch reviewed in June 2012.1 As the review sample of the Pro-Logue Premium was fitted with EL34 output tubes, I set the bias switch on the amplifier’s right side panel to the appropriate bias position. The voltage gain into 8 ohms was 28.65dB from the 8 ohm output-transformer tap and 28.15dB from the 4 ohm tap, and the ProLogue Premium preserved absolute polarity from…

I wrote several issues back that my first high-end headphones were Koss Pro4AAs, which I bought in 1972 following a positive review in the British magazine Hi-Fi News. Although that review didn’t mention that the Pro4AAs were relatively fragile,1 I nonetheless loved their sound. They were the best headphones I’d heard—until, a couple years later, I was playing bass on some sessions for record producer Tony Cox. Tony had a pair of signal-energized electrostatic headphones, Koss ESP-6es, which were heavy and clunky— but they opened my ears to the sound quality that could be obtained from “cans.” I didn’t hear better until after I’d moved to Santa Fe, in 1986, and J. Gordon Holt loaned me his review samples of the Stax SR-Lambda Pros.2 Koss’s ESP-6 model is long out…

THIS ISSUE: Audio Tekne, Kuzma, Monitor Audio, and PS Audio respond to our reviews. Audio Tekne TEA-8695 Editor: On behalf on Natural Sound, I would like to thank Michael Fremer for a thorough examination and wonderful review of the Audio Tekne TEA-8695 phono preamplifier. We would really appreciate if the reviewer would say something about the cartridge and cabling used during the test, which influences the sound of the system a lot. We strongly encourage everybody to listen to a complete Audio Tekne system, as only in this setup can one fully enjoy all aspects of Audio Tekne’s natural sound. One word about the price: The price for the US market is $55,000, with an introductory discount, as we have just started to represent Audio Tekne in the US. Hari…

TAKE HEED! Unless marked otherwise, all letters to the magazine and its writers are assumed to be for possible publication. In the spirit of vigorous debate implied by the First Amendment, and unless we are requested not to, we publish correspondents’ e-mail addresses. The ultimate test Editor: On the subject of comparisons, I would like to add just one word about the subjective vs objective approaches to listening to music. When my wife says to me, “Fred, you’re the best lover ever,” I don’t respond, “Have you done a double-blind test?” —Fred Parmenter Medfield, MA Music lovers Editor: Re: “Lovers of music” (“Letters,” September 2016, p.11), Mr. Jackson’s conclusion is philosophical: “The music is the thing . . .” I agree; the music is the thing that gets me going,…

I performed a full set of measurements on the Heed Elixir using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/measurements-maps-precision). I preconditioned the amplifier by running it with both channels driven at one-third power into 8 ohms for 60 minutes. Thermally, this is the worst-case situation for an amplifier with a class-B or class-AB output stage, as one-third power is when the maximum heat dissipation occurs in the output transistors. As the Heed Elixir’s maximum power is specified as 50Wpc into 8 ohms, I ran it for an hour at 16.6Wpc into 8 ohms. At the end of that time, the top panel was hot, 119°F (48.3°C) and the internal heatsinks, which could be seen through the vents in the top, were very hot,…

Monitor Audio’s Platinum PL300 II loudspeakers weigh 120 lbs each, and my listening room is on the second floor, but I was spared the heavy lifting. The speakers were delivered by Sheldon Ginn, Jeffrey Ginn, and Jamie Arseneau—respectively, the VP of Sales and Marketing, Account Manager, and Service Manager of Kevro International, Monitor Audio’s North American distributor. We set up the PL300 IIs, ensuring that the distance from each speaker to my listening seat was the same, then optimized the toe-in: the speakers ended up almost directly facing the listener position, close to where I’d had Wilson Audio’s Sabrinas.1 We then listened to selections from a few CDs. The sound was so good that I had difficulty maintaining the requisite Stereophile reviewer’s poker face. However, Sheldon Ginn knew the reviewing…

I measured the Mytek Brooklyn with my newly recalibrated Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4). As well as the Audio Precision’s analog and digital outputs, I used WAV and AIFF test-tone files sourced via USB from my MacBook Pro running on battery power with Pure Music 3.0. I updated the firmware to v.2.2.1 before the testing, using the Brooklyn Control app running on my laptop. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the Brooklyn as “Brooklyn DAC” from “Mytek Digital,” its serial number as “03105-1605-101,” and confirmed that the USB interface supported audio recording as well as playback. The Brooklyn’s USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode, and Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that it accepted 32-bit integer data via USB sampled at all…

Iused DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Monitor Audio PL300 II’s frequency response in the farfield; and, for the nearfield frequency responses, an Earthworks QTC-40, which has a 1⁄4" capsule and thus doesn’t present a significant obstacle to the sound. For logistical reasons, I measured a different sample of the PL3000 II (serial no.100047) than those auditioned by Robert Deutsch. I left both rear-panel ports open for the measurements and left the grilles in place. My estimate of the PL 300 II’s voltage sensitivity was 87dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is 3dB lower than the specified figure of 90dB/W/m. The speaker’s electrical impedance magnitude and phase are shown in fig.1. The PL300 II is specified as a 4 ohm load with a minimum value of 4.2…

THIS ISSUE: Further listens to a PS Audio DAC, the EnigmAcoustics supertweeter, and some classic Koss headphones. Ted Smith, PS Audio’s wizard of converting digital signals to analog, has been at it again. It’s not as if he hadn’t warned us. In the November 2015 issue I reported on Yale, the latest iteration of the DirectStream D/A processor’s operating system.1 Although Yale was, in my estimation, a considerable improvement on the OS that preceded it—Pikes Peak— Smith said at the time that he was “already working on ideas that should make it much, much better still.” Now we have Torreys, DirectStream’s latest OS, available for free download2 from PS Audio’s website ($29 when supplied on a pre-formatted SD Card or USB stick, the latter for the DirectStream Junior DAC only).…

There is no dearth of recordings by the great Argentine pianist Martha Argerich—over 150 are listed in her discography— and here, in honor of her 75th birthday, are two more discs, comprising previously unreleased material. Argerich has been playing publicly since she was eight years old; in 1957, she won the Busoni and Geneva competitions and continued to concertize, but it was not until she won the Chopin Competition, in Warsaw, in 1965 that she began to become a household name (in pianistloving households). It is said that she has never given a bad concert or made a poor or uninteresting recording; this new set does nothing to contradict it. The recordings here were all made in studios in 1960, save for the Prokofiev Sonata 7, from 1967. All of…

“The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.” —NICK CAVE In 1971, Bruce Iglauer, a 23-year-old employee of Chicago’s Delmark Records (whose founder Bob Koester was the subject of the July 2016 Aural Robert), decided to start his own record label for the most primal of reasons. “I fell in love with Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers! And 45 years later, I still have a label to record my favorite bands.” The riches of the Alligator Records catalog, now numbering around 300 titles, are many. Although Iglauer at first focused on Chicago’s electric blues, over the years he and his label began to mix in different flavors, from Louisiana, Texas, and the West Coast. Even a casual browsing of my shelves turned up many…