Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2015 i Stereophile

THIS ISSUE: it’s a thorny question: what music should exhibitors at audio shows play? THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS To put it mildly, Jack Vad was dismayed. The Grammy Award–winning media producer and chief engineer for the San Francisco Symphony had just returned from the 2014 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest,1 and was trying to make sense of his experiences there. When he’d carried his latest recordings, which I think are superbly recorded, into rooms at the show and asked if he could play them, exhibitors were anything but enthusiastic. Vad, who at RMAF 2014 also appeared in an “Experts Ask the Experts” panel discussion, and presented formal demos of the same recordings in the Parasound and Sony rooms, had brought along a flash drive containing high-resolution…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated to you:www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audiosociety information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@XLinkAudio.com. 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. ARIZONA ■ Wednesday, February 25, 7pm: The Arizona Audio-Video Club will hold its monthly meeting at the Marriott Airport Hotel (1101 N. 44th Street, Phoenix). The meeting will feature demonstrations of Unison Research vacuum-tube electronics and Axis VoiceBox S speakers by Colleen Cardas and Marc Phillips, of Colleen Cardas Imports. Guests are welcome and refreshments will be served. For more info, visit www.azavclub.org, or contact Adam Goldfine at goldfneam@aol.com or (602)…

THESE DAYS when Mark Turner leads his quartet, there are actually five instruments on stage. Along with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Marcus Gilmore, there’s a fifth instrument you can hear but not see. It’s invisible. It’s called space. “I agree with that,” Turner says between bites of waffe in the kitchen of his home in Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Garden neighborhood, where his two dogs keep a wary eye on this visitor from Park Slope. “Some of it happens, but also I defnitely write it in. The most obvious examples are when the rhythm section drops out in some of the tunes—like in “Brother Sister 2,” it happens quite a bit. Totally open space, one instrument at a time. It brings nakedness; it brings tenderness, but nakedness…

For a welcome change from my usual routine, I drove 250 miles north, into snowy upstate New York, to measure Wilson Audio’s Duette Series 2 in situ chez Dudley. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Wilson’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. The amplifier used for the quasi-anechoic responses was the solid-state Musical Fidelity 250W monoblock that I bought 10 years ago to use for all my speaker measurements. For the in-room response measurement, I used the amplifier Art used for his listening, tubed Shindo Corton-Charlemagne monos. The Duette’s voltage sensitivity is specified as 92dB/W/m at 1kHz; my estimate was 91.6dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is both within experimental error of the specification…

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. Swords into plowshares (part 634) Editor: A little DIY audio from the heartland (be sure the primer has been fred before proceeding): http://tinyurl.com/nmdatkh. —Robert Mason Woodside, NY bobmason666@gmail.com Home alone? Editor: I understand the message in Steve Guttenberg’s “As We See It” in January 2015 (p.3), but I want to share an alternative view. I regularly go to the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s concerts. The SSO has a new, state-of-the-art venue, Benaroya Hall, and the acoustics are to die for. I sit in the center about 7 to…

THIS ISSUE: Listening impressions of the Kiseki Purpleheart N.S. phono cartridge and the Lamm LP 2.1 phono preamplifier. At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Herman van den Dungen handed me a surprise: a brand new Kiseki Blue cartridge manufactured from new-old-stock parts. It wasn’t mine to take home—only to look at, to prove it was real. Herman van den Dungen may not be a household name even for audiophiles, but his products are: his PrimaLuna electronics are exported from the Netherlands to the US and distributed by tube connoisseur and collector Kevin Deal for PrimaLuna USA. In the 1980s, Kiseki was legendary among audiophiles, even if their cartridges’ prices were beyond the reach of most. But the brand’s history is less well known—and younger analog devotees may not have heard…

Several seconds after I began listening to it, I knew that Theta Digital’s Prometheus monoblock amplifer ($12,000/pair) was different from other amplifers. The violins and brass were more dynamic, and had more pace. The orchestra sounded more three dimensional, depicted in relief by a degree of hall ambience I hadn’t heard when I played the same recording through my reference solid-state stereo amplifer, a Mark Levinson No.334. I’ve experienced other such “revelations” on first hearing a new audio component. Sometimes this first impression is accurate, as with the unique transparency of Day Sequerra’s Reference FM tuner. Sometimes it’s misleading, such as the strong room lock in the bass response with pedal notes of pipe organs I heard through Escalante Design’s Fremont loudspeakers—and later discovered was a serious coloration that troubled…

I measured the Boulder 2110’s electrical performance with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4). As set up for the review, the volume control operated in accurate 0.5dB steps, the 2110 preserved absolute polarity (ie, was non-inverting, with pin 2 of the XLR jacks hot), and its maximum gain was exactly 20dB, as specified, for both the balanced and unbalanced inputs. The input impedance was very high, at an estimated 170k ohms (the specification states 333k ohms, but the voltage-drop method I use is not accurate for impedances greater than 100k ohms), and the balanced output impedance was 100 ohms, as specified. The top pair of traces in fg.1 shows the Boulder’s frequency response into 100k ohms, the bottom pair into…

Looking back at our September 2014 issue, I think my review of the Triangle Signature Delta loudspeaker1 marked something of a watershed in the evolution of my taste in loudspeaker sound quality. For decades I have been a devotee of what might be called “British” sound: low coloration and, overall, a rather polite presentation, coupled with low sensitivity. The Triangle speaker opened my ears to what could be achieved with a very different approach: still-low coloration but high sensitivity, impressive clarity, and a hefty dose of what the late J. Gordon Holt called “jump factor,” in which the leading edges of transients are neither smeared nor tamed. So when, last September, on a visit to Dallas and The Sound Organisation, the US distributor of Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries (DALI), I…

CLASSICAL ROCK / POP JAZZ What makes a great singer great is a magical combination of virtuosic physical skills with mental and emotional powers of interpretation that allow you to hear and feel a lyric’s subtext: the emotions the songwriter hoped to evoke by a turn in the melody. “Because love is the saddest thing / When it stays behind . . .” Singing those lines from the title track of Amar en Paz (To Love in Peace), the latest from the inventive team at the Spanish label Calle 54, famenco singer Estrella Morente—most famous in the US for having been the singing voice of Penélope Cruz in the film Volver—spins a very personal emotional web, and in the process creates a cross-lingual masterpiece. The song’s original Portuguese title is…

KEITH JARRETT TRIO Hamburg ’72 Keith Jarrett, piano, soprano saxophone, percussion; Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motian, drums, percussion ECM 2422 (CD). 1972/2014. Michael Naura, orig. prod.; Hans-Heinrich Breitkreuz, orig. eng.; Manfred Eicher, prod., remix; Jan Erik Kongshaug, remix. AAD. TT: 55:22 PERFORMANCE SONICS This radio broadcast, recorded before an audience in Hamburg, Germany in 1972, is the fourth and final album by Keith Jarrett’s trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, the respective bassist and drummer for Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans. The best recording available of Jarrett’s first professional band, it’s the only one that sounds fully mature. It’s worth buying for “Rainbow” alone, a ballad by Jarrett’s first wife, Margot: a rhapsodic solo-piano intro of wildly intelligent runs and relentless modulation that never lose contact with the changes,…

THERE’S ONLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC: THE BLUES AND ZIPPETY DOO-DAH. –TOWNES VAN ZANDT “I found the one mythical grail which is the Benedetti stuff so I figure my work here is done,”MOSAIC FOUNDER MICHAEL CUSCUNA. The catalog of recordings left by Charlie Parker, aka Bird, is, like his life, one of the more tangled and byzantine in all of jazz. While most of his recordings were made for the Dial, Savoy, and Verve labels, issues, reissues, bootlegs, and stuff from God knows where recorded by God knows who, some of it obtained via opaque licensing agreements or outright piracy, continue to be released the world over on labels large (MGM, Atlantic, Elektra/Musician) and small (Pilz, Saga, Zim). The CD era brought a new wave of bad-sounding radio transcriptions and…

SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should e-mail the when, where, and who to JAtkinson@enthusiastnetwork.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the April 2015 issue is January 20, 2015. 12 YEARS OF “RECOMMENDED COMPONENTS” John Atkinson “Recommended Components” has been Stereophile’s most popular feature since its first appearance, in the fifth issue of the magazine. Fifty-two years later, we’ve put together a special issue: Stereophile Recommended Components Collector’s Edition. While the regular “Recommended Components” listings in our April and October issues concentrate on products that have been reviewed in the previous three years, this special 180-page issue features capsule reviews of every audio component that has been reviewed and recommended by Stereophile’s team of writers and editors in the 12 years…

THIS ISSUE: The Audiodesksysteme Gläss Vinyl Cleaner is put through its paces. It’s a Clean Machine I’m old enough to remember Fizzies: tablets that were promised to transform mere water into an effervescent soft drink. They showed up on my radar when I was five, at a time when impatience stood between me and the full Fizzies experience: I couldn’t wait for the Bromo-Seltzer–like tablet to dissolve completely, so I was rewarded with little favor and lots of undissolved sugar shards. At my present age, I would be likelier to drop a Fizzie into a glass of water, walk away, and forget I had ever done so. Fizzies came to mind the first time I used the Audiodesksysteme Gläss Vinyl Cleaner ($4450), a sample of which was loaned to me…

I performed a full set of measurements using Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It,” www.stereophile.com/content/measurements-maps-precision). As the Theta Prometheus has a switching output stage that produces ultrasonic noise that would overload the Audio Precision’s input circuitry, I carried out most of the tests using, ahead of the analyzer, an Audio Precision AUX-0025 passive low-pass filter (see http://ap.com/products/accessories/aux0100). Usually, before measuring an amplifier, I run it for an hour at one-third power into 8 ohms— the most thermally stressful condition for a class-B output stage. But as the Prometheus has a class-D output, that preconditioning is irrelevant. Even so, I subjected serial number 050085 to this test to ensure that it had settled into its long-term operating condition.(The chassis was slightly warm at…

I’ve seen how most manufacturers work. They start out by making products they believe in—products consumers are likely to love. But after a while they begin listening to their dealers and distributors and marketing consultants, most of whom are inclined to say things like: “You need to make a six-figure turntable, to compete with all the other six-figure turntables.” “You need to make a $1500 amplifier, to fill that price gap in your product line.” “You need to make a small, stand-mounted loudspeaker.” It’s my impression that Wilson Audio Specialties doesn’t work that way. I think they set out to make the speakers they wish to make. Those products tend to look and sound the way they do and sell for the prices they do as simple consequences of the…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the DALI Rubicon 8’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. My estimate of the Rubicon 8’s voltage sensitivity was 89.8dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is both within experimental error of the specified 90.5dB and significantly higher than average. Though this is 2dB lower than the Triangle Delta Signature’s sensitivity, the Rubicon 8 will still play loudly with low-powered amplifiers. Those amplifiers, however, should be comfortable with driving low impedances: the DALI’s impedance is specified as 4 ohms, though the solid trace in fg.1 reveals that its impedance magnitude actually remains above 4 ohms at all audio frequencies, and varies very little above 100Hz. Other than a combination of…

WILL BUTLER Policy Merge MRG540 (CD). 2015. Will Butler, prod.; Ben Baptie, Mark Lawson, Jeremy Gara, engs. AAD? TT: 27:12 PERFORMANCE SONICS Arcade Fire fans expecting something Arcade-esque from Will Butler will likely be disappointed, or at least thrown off, by Butler’s solo debut. Although he has an upper-register singing style that will recall older brother and fellow A.F. member Win Butler, only one track of the dozen that make up Policy can really be likened to the anthemic music that is Arcade Fire’s stock-in-trade. That the exuberant, shouty “What I Want” isn’t even close to being the best tune here potentially bodes well for the younger Butler, who has already shared an Oscar nomination (with A.F. collaborator Owen Pallett) for Best Original Score, for Her (2013). Policy is all…

ANY CLOD CAN HAVE THE FACTS; HAVING OPINIONS IS AN ART THIS ISSUE: Ultra Systems/Audiodesksysteme, DigiBit, Pioneer, Boulder, and PS Audio comment on our reviews of their products Audiodesksysteme Vinyl Cleaner Editor: We are grateful to Art Dudley for his thorough report on the Audiodesksysteme Vinyl Cleaner, and happy to have provided him with some “wow” moments this winter. He mentions that development of the Vinyl Cleaner may have taken quite some time. In fact, it was four long years. The first prototype, about six months in, was a somewhat primitive “brute force” ultrasonic machine, actually quite similar to a couple of ultrasonic-only machines currently available on the market from other companies. But brute force and the LP don’t mix well, as Art’s descriptions of the teeny-tiny size of the…