Stereophile August 2014

Playing recorded music in the home is a complex, coded, cultural experience: We sit, we listen, we think and dream—and, when it feels just right, we admire. We admire who we are and how we arrived at this beautiful moment. This simple act of admiration is usually a happy sort of self-congratulatory expression of our basic desire to have meaningful as well as enjoyable experiences. We are proud of our good taste and love of music. But this type of listening can also provoke anxiety and self-recrimination. We ask ourselves why we like this music and not some other kind. What would my friends think if they knew I was listening to “truckin’ wit’ th’ doo-dah man”—or Deodato? And if you’re an audiophile... holy crap. You have so much more…

Why I love Stereophile Editor: It’s not afraid to publish letters critical of the content, including my letter you recently published in the May edition (p.11). But I also want to give praise when it is due. I enjoy the writing and the stories. “Sam’s Space” in May had me laughing out loud when he mentioned keeping digital away from the amp (p.23): “You wouldn’t put the litter box next to the kitchen table, would you?” Around Y2K I bought a Musical Fidelity A300 integrated amplifier based on Sam’s recommendation. It has served me well ever since. In all these years, all it ever needed was a volume-pot cleaning. So thanks for the advice, Sam, then and now. Last year’s digital rose may be this year’s litter box, but my…

GERMANY: MUNICH Paul Messenger Arriving in Munich for High End 2014 (May 15–18), I looked forward to seeing Art Dudley, whom I’d met only once before, at a UK audio show eight years before. We’d got on very well then, and now would chat over breakfast—we were staying in the same hotel. I’ll try not to duplicate his coverage of High End at www.stereophile.com/category/munich-2014. This is the year we’re supposed to be clawing our way out of recession, and this edition of the annual High End event, which is sponsored by Germany’s High End Society, provided some evidence of that. As I reported in May (p.15), British hi-fi sales might well be struggling right now, both to attract new and younger consumers and customers at the higher end; the situation…

At the 2013 High End Show, in Munich, a tonearm designer displayed a pivoting tangential tracker. A nearly invisible length of monofilament wrapped around the arm’s perimeter controlled the pivoting headshell of the box-girder–like arm. It may very well have worked as promised, but was it practical? And with so many tiny moving parts, would it sound any good? I don’t know—it was a silent display—and inquisitive attendees kept bumping the difficult-to-see monofilament, dislodging it from its track. The odds weren’t good that this contraption, however well intended, would ever get past the prototype stage, though I was going to look for it at the 2014 Munich show, in May. Sometimes, designers obsessed with one particular performance parameter lose sight of the forest for the trees. The designer of ViV…

Has it really been 30 years since an engineer named William H. Firebaugh unleashed on the audio world his radical and decidedly affordable Well Tempered Arm?1 Indeed it has—and today, at 82, Bill Firebaugh seems busier than ever, with so many irons in the fire that he’s been forced to give up the noble game of golf—an irony, as you’ll see in a moment. Firebaugh started down this road in the 1970s, while working at Ford Aerospace. “That was the time when FFT analyzers were appearing on the scene,” he says. “We used a lot of Brüel & Kjær gear in our work, so we received all of the technical papers that Brüel & Kjær published. That was the only reason I ever saw a paper of theirs titled ‘Audible…

The CD-200 is the new CD-only player from TASCAM, the professional-audio division of TEAC. It has unbalanced analog outputs, and RCA and optical digital outputs. The CD-200 also has a new transport, the CD-5020A, designed by TEAC for audio use. Unlike many affordable disc-spinning devices with slotloading transports (eg, inexpensive DVD players starting at $29.99), the CD-200 has a traditional drawer mechanism that has been upgraded to minimize the noise of loading and clamping a disc. TASCAM also claims improvements in the internal clock function, for smoother sound and lower jitter. The CD-200 has the shape of a standard 2RU (Rack-Unit) professional component. It weighs 9.3 lbs (4.2kg) and measures 19" (485mm) wide by 3.72" (95mm) high by 11.73" (300mm) deep, and is shipped with rack-mount ears installed (they’re easily…