Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2014 i Stereophile

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…

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…

We had a rough start today,” Paul Stache says, shaking his head with a slightly exasperated smile as he watches Pro Tools faders on his monitor. It’s a sunny Monday afternoon at Smoke, a jazz club on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and while outside a panhandler works the sidewalk—“Hey, baby, you got any change?”—inside, this uptown staple of Gotham’s late-night jazz scene now spends Monday afternoons doubling as a recording studio. “Half an hour before the session, we lost our hard drive,” Stache explains. “You have the band showing up on time, and everybody’s here and they want to play music—and then an hour and half waiting around while we set up a new computer. Obviously, it wasn’t ideal. But I think the results will be convincing.” For Stache and…

INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER They spoiled all my fun. When I receive a product sample for review, I look forward to taking photos while I unpack the thing, as a guide to repacking for later on. This company provided an illustrated packing list—it was the first thing I saw on slitting open the carton. I look forward to crafting amusing remarks about poorly written or whimsically translated owner’s manuals; this company provided the clearest, most comprehensive manual I’ve ever seen. I look forward to having some sort of anomalous event—smoke, noise, or smoke and noise—to write about. This product offered nothing of the sort. The company in question is Germany’s Octave Audio, and the sample they provided was of their entry-level integrated amplifier, the V 40 SE Line ($5300)—a remarkably well-built, well-presented,…

Musical Fidelity V90-DAC Sam Tellig raved about this inexpensive D/A processor1 in our April 2014 issue (p.23): “My head is spinning,” he wrote, adding that, “compared to the V-DACII, the V90-DAC offers still greater low-level resolution, superior dynamics, and fatigue-free listening. It does space and place particularly well, and really shines with brass, where lesser DACs tend to turn dull.” When I e-mailed Stereophile’s writers last January for their suggested ratings for the latest edition of the magazine’s “Recommended Components,” also in the April issue, ST recommended a Class A rating for the $299 V90-DAC. But, he added, with perhaps a twinkle in his eye, that this was the best DAC he had heard. I therefore provisionally placed the V90-DAC in Class A+, deciding that I needed to listen to…

It’s a ones and zeros world and us analog beings just live in it. For some in this ever more digitizing world, going back in history seems to hold a potent allure. In music, this accounts for curios like a wax cylinder of KISS or They Might Be Giants. Or Jack White’s blossoming new interest in making 78rpm discs. Or Michael Cumella’s burgeoning DJ business using only 78s, most recorded in the era of acoustic recording. Although Cumella only recently began playing the rigid, fast-spinning discs at cocktail hours and pre-wedding ceremonies, he now does more than 40 gigs a year, and the number is rising. An LP collector and music fan in high school who used to get shanghaied into playing records at parties in his hometown of Nutley,…

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…

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…

Abbey Road: The Best Studio in the World By Alistair Lawrence. Foreword by Sir George Martin. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012. £50/$75. Amazon sells it for $45.99. Hardcover, 12.1" by 12.1" by 1.2", 304 pp. Includes chronology and biographical index. Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was an essentially selftaught musician of humble provincial origins. In one of his first professional jobs, he wrote arrangements for and conducted a band or small orchestra made up of staff and inmates at the local insane asylum. Elgar never knew who was going to show up, so he learned the skill of arranging on the fly for odd assortments of instruments, including bassoon. That intensely practical experience laid the foundation for his maturing into one of the most deft, self-confident, and creative orchestrators of the…

INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER Once, on a cold, dank, soundless day deep in the Eastern bloc, I watched a man spend over a million dollars on an audio system: a turntable, a fancy horn tweeter, a few wires, and some amplification for his modified Klipschorns. I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was a notary public. Everyone there smirked and watched as he excitedly put the tonearm down on the first record, AC/DC’s Back in Black. He laughed, he danced, he didn’t sit down. He just skipped around the room, grinning and bouncing like a caffeinated child. I thought, Does this man really need all this expensive gear to get that bouncy? That notary public came to mind while I was removing my venerable Creek…

There was a time when calling the Black Keys “sexy” would have been thought perversely stunted, given that they were a two-man, raw-ashell, blow-me-down, frat-rock grinder that jammed and pounded and convinced everyone that their version of Tony Joe White’s groove was something new and revolutionary. Yet their eighth studio record is so smooth and downright dreamy in spots, white-soul music crossed with psychedelic rock and tinted slightly blue, and all so slick—there, I said it—that it’s downright scary. Turn Blue sounds and feels like a much-needed change forward for a band that seemed to have come to the highest expression of its best ideas on the Grammywinning El Camino (2011). With Turn Blue, guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney seemed to have understood it was time to grow…

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…

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…

LINE PREAMPLIFIER A preamplifier is the port of entry through which you gain access to the sources you’ve so carefully assembled. It’s also the gate through which all of your music passes. So while its sonic performance is obviously critical, you’d also better assess how it feels, how it looks, and how it operates—you’re going to be in an intimate relationship with it for a long time. Before choosing a preamplifier, therefore, take some time to drive it around the block, or at least shake hands with it. Use your imagination as much as your ears. Bling that Sings You may find the looks of the Momentum preamplifier, from Dan D’Agostino Master Audio Systems, breathtaking or way over the top—it’s a matter of taste. To me, the Momentum ($32,000) is…

DUAL-MONO LINE PREAMPLIFIER I’ve long been impressed by the design, construction, and sound of the tubed electronics produced by Vladimir Lamm, but I’d never had a Lamm Industries product in my house. So I asked for a review sample of Lamm’s flagship line-stage preamplifier, the LL1 Signature. When it arrived, I realized I’d never asked about the price. When, in response to an e-mail, Lamm told me it cost $42,790/pair, I blinked. What kind of person spends that much on a preamp?1 I thought about three friends, each of whom has a net worth in nine figures. Two aren’t into audio, and while the third’s most recent impulse purchase was a cattle ranch in Texas, he’s still using the pair of Magnepan SMGs I bought for him 25 years ago.…

ViV Laboratory Rigid Float Editor: First of all, we would like to express our greatest gratitude, and feel great honor, for the review of the Rigid Float (RF) tonearm being allocated so many pages. Although the first (9") RF tonearm tested by Mr. Fremer was thought to be defective, it was not defective. Instead, for some reason, its bearing cup lacked sufficient oil. I discovered this when the 9" RF was returned to our lab, where it exhibited the same, quite unstable vertical tracking force (VTF) reading and undesirable sound as Mr. Fremer had observed. After I injected 2ml of oil in the cup, it returned to normal operation in both respects, as originally designed. Our apology for causing some confusion, but the job of injecting the oil with the…