Stereophile Mar-14

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…