Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2015 i Stereophile

THERE ARE AS MANY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE EXPERTS THIS ISSUE: Is the writing on the wall for both high-end audio and the record industry? The day before I began writing this, John Atkinson posted on Stereophile’s website a chart from Nielsen Soundscan showing the ski-jump–like path CD sales have been on since 2004.1 In 2004, total sales were 651 million units; in 2014, 141 million units. All that is lacking from that impactful visual to make the ski-jump analogy perfect is the little uptick at the end to launch the skier into free air. Those numbers look to me like a total decline in sales of 78%. Ouch. My audio retailer friend Bob Saglio stopped by today. He had with him the first CD he’d bought in living memory:…

IN SEARCH OF THE EXCEPTIONAL THIS ISSUE: Thoughts on the current state of high-end audio cables, and a report on the Expression interconnect from Canadian manufacturer BIS Audio. “I don’t know what I think on that one. I haven’t written about it yet.” —WALTER LIPPMANN (ATTRIBUTED) As sometimes happens, this started out to be a very different column. But by the time I was a thousand words into it, I found that my point of view had changed. A number of months ago, I received from a Canadian company called BIS Audio a review sample of their Expression interconnect: a shielded, unbalanced interconnect terminated with Eichmann BulletPlugs (RCA). Priced at $480 Canadian per 1m pair, the Expression falls squarely in the middle of BIS’s interconnect line: a lowish range for high-end…

To some, the measure of a company has less to do with the amount of money it makes than with the honesty of the things it sells: the assurance that every product in its line is designed not as a marketing exercise but as a straightforward and presumably unique answer to a real consumer need. Consider Harbeth, founded in 1977 by ex-BBC engineer Dudley Harwood, the first syllable of whose surname is immortalized on thousands of loudspeakers whose shared heritage is unmistakable. That in itself is testament to the durability of Harwood’s point of view, and to the no-less-apparent dedication of Alan Shaw—who, since 1986, when Dudley Harwood retired, has owned and steered the company. One is forgiven for regarding Shaw as the rare businessperson who bought a company not…

I measured the VAC Signature SE’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. The cramped space on my test bench meant that I had to place the audio enclosure atop the power supply, but I separated them with 3" spacers. Looking first at the performance of the line inputs, the left channel’s maximum gain into 100k ohms was the same in balanced and unbalanced modes, at 10dB rather than the specified 12dB. This will not be an issue in practice. Feeding the preamplifier an unbalanced signal and measuring the output at the balanced jacks gave the same 10dB maximum gain. Both modes preserved absolute polarity (ie, were non-inverting), the XLRs being wired with pin 2 hot. Fig.1 VAC…

ANY CLOD CAN HAVE THE FACTS; HAVING OPINIONS IS AN ART THIS ISSUE: Neil Young, Ortofon, Soundsmith, BIS, Harbeth, Hegel, and VAC comment on our reviews of their products. Pono Music PonoPlayer Editor: Hello to all Stereophile readers. I’d like to personally thank John Atkinson and the Stereophile crew for your appreciation of the PonoPlayer and what it delivers. I first realized that Pono had to happen when it became clear to me that we had lost the connection with music with the dominance of MP3, downloading, and streaming. The goal for Pono was simple: bring the music back, for all of us. Realizing it, making it happen, was a bit more tricky. As the community around Pono has grown—it currently approaches 43,000 people—we have learned more and more about…

INSIDER VIEWS ON EVERYTHING VINYL THIS ISSUE: Ikeda Sound Labs Kai cartridge plus more on Ortofon’s MC A95 cartridge. But first, the blowback I expected following my April 2014 column on Synergistic Research’s Uniform Energy Field Technology room treatments never arrived—in fact, quite the opposite. My own positive experience of the UEF devices was confirmed by e-mails from readers who’d already used them, and from those who’d taken up Synergistic’s offer of a money-back guarantee. Skeptics will charge that what I and these readers heard is evidence of confirmation bias, but people say this about any positive remarks made about audio components priced above $500. The other day, I received an e-mail from Art Noxon, who invented the TubeTrap room treatment, manufactured by Acoustic Sciences Corp. TubeTraps have been a…

The story’s been often told: 30 years ago, British speaker manufacturer KEF was asked to design a small, spherical loudspeaker that could be used in a European project to research room acoustics. The speaker had to have wide, even dispersion, so KEF’s solution was to mount the tweeter coaxially, on what would have been the woofer’s dustcap. That “point source” drive-unit, called the Uni-Q, began appearing in KEF’s commercial speaker models in 1989, starting with the Reference 105/3—but it wasn’t until the appearance of KEF’s 50th-anniversary loudspeaker, the LS50, which I reviewed in December 2012,1 that I felt that the Uni-Q drive-unit had fully fulfilled its promise, at least in a speaker I had auditioned in my own room. Designed by a team led by engineer Jack Oclee-Brown, the LS50…

Iused DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Harbeth Super HL5plus’s frequency response in the farfield; and an Earthworks QTC-40, with its small, 1⁄4”-diameter capsule, for the nearfield responses. The Harbeth is specified as having a sensitivity of 86dB/W/m, and my estimate of its voltage sensitivity was the same: 86dB(B)/2.83V/m. Though this is 1dB or so below average, I commend Harbeth for not inflating this specification. Although the Super HL5plus has a specified impedance of 6 ohms, my measurement (fig.1) indicates that the speaker’s impedance remains above 8 ohms for almost all of the audioband, and that the electrical phase angle remains relatively small. The HL5plus will therefore be an easy load for the partnering amplifier to drive, and a good match for tubed…

I measured the Hegel H160 using my recently recalibrated Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com, and the January 2008 “As We See It” at www.stereophile.com/content/measurementsmaps-precision). Before performing any measurements on an amplifier, I run it for an hour at one-third its specified maximum power, which, thermally, is the worst case for an amplifier with a class-B or -AB output stage. I cut short this preconditioning of the H160 after 20 minutes, however, as the THD+noise, which had been just 0.00315% with the amplifier cold, had risen to 0.83%. The chassis was mildly warm, at 92.2°F (33.4°C), but the temperature of the internal heatsinks must have been much higher. Allowing the amplifier to cool brought back correct operation, with very low distortion, but this is not an amplifier suitable for sustained…

Aurender was a name new to me when I encountered the company at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, where they displayed a range of music servers designed in California and manufactured in South Korea. But what caught my attention in Aurender’s suite was their Flow portable D/A headphone amplifier ($1295). This handsome, battery-powered device, housed in a machined aluminum case about twice the size of a pack of playing cards, offers optical S/PDIF and USB 2.0/3.0 input ports and a single 1/4" stereo headphone jack. Two features distinguish the Flow from the pack: Its USB input can be used with iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Android smartphone sources, and it can accept an mSATA drive (not included in price) of up to 1TB capacity for internal storage of audio files. Visually, the…

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 August 2015 issue is May 20, 2015. US: QUEENS, NEW YORK John Atkinson I am deeply saddened to inform everyone that the review of VAC’s Statement preamplifier in this issue is the last by Robert J. Reina that we will publish. Bob passed away Friday, March 27, after a brief battle with cancer that began in his esophagus in fall 2014. Bob was 61. After a stint at The Abso!ute Sound, Bob cofounded a high-end audio magazine, Sounds Like . . . , and joined Stereophile in 1995; his first review, published in December 1995, was of a Creek…

With the Ikeda Kai ($8500) in the Kuzma 4Point tonearm and the Ortofon A95 ($6500; See “Analog Corner,” May 2015) in the Continuum Audio Labs Cobra arm, and both arms mounted on the Continuum Caliburn turntable, it wasn’t difficult to switch between them. But it wasn’t instantaneous—I also had to switch from Ypsilon’s MC-26L step-up transformer to their MC-16L. (Actually, the optimal step-up for the A95’s output of 0.23mV would probably have been Ypsilon’s MC-20L, but I don’t have one. Ypsilon’s Demetris Backlavas assured me that the MC-16L was sufficient to properly drive the VPS-100.) Yarlung Records ( www.yarlungrecords.com) will soon release on vinyl an AAA recording, Vanish, by the innovative percussion group Smoke and Mirrors. Currently available in various digital editions, the album is musically varied and thoroughly entertaining.…

EXPLORING THE ANALOG ADVENTURE THIS ISSUE: Soundsmith’s Carmen moving-iron phono cartridge and MMP3 phono stage light HR’s fire. So, audiophiles, riddle me this: What does a DAC actually look like? I don’t mean the box it hides in—I mean the little doodad that does the actual converting from digital to analog. Is it bigger than a phono cartridge? Is it made of rain-forest wood, gemstone, or porcelain? Do people show it to their friends, who gawk in awe and envy? Does it have an exotic, geisha-sounding name like Jasmine Tiger, Koetsu Onyx, or Miyajima Takumi? When it breaks, does a watchmaker type rebuild it for a not-insubstantial fee? Do people hoard them in vaults, like NOS tubes? Can you trade a DAC for a rose-gold Rolex Oyster Bubbleback ca 1945?…

Stereophile KEF Blade 2 Impedance (ohms) & Phase (deg) vs Frequency (Hz) Fig.1 KEF Blade Two, electrical impedance (solid) and phase (dashed) (2 ohms/vertical div.). Fig.2 KEF Blade Two, cumulative spectral-decay plot calculated from output of accelerometer fastened to center of front baffle below bottom woofer (MLS driving voltage to speaker, 7.55V; measurement bandwidth, 2kHz). I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the KEF Blade Two’s frequency response in the far field, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. The Blade Two’s voltage sensitivity is specified as 90dB/2.83V/m; my estimate was somewhat lower than this, at 87.1dB(B)/2.83V/m. The Blade Two’s nominal impedance is 4 ohms, with a minimum value of 3.2 ohms. My measurement (fig.1) revealed a minimum…

With the Aurender Flow’s battery fully charged, I measured it with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4. Sources were TosLink from the SYS2722, USB from my 2012 MacBook Pro (running on battery power), or USB from my iPad 2 via the camera connection kit. Macintosh’s USB Prober utility reported the Flow’s product string as “Aurender-FLOW-6027 Output” and the manufacturer string as “XMOS.” USB Prober also confirmed that the Flow’s USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The TosLink input locked to datastreams with sample rates up to 96kHz, the USB input up to 384kHz. The iPad was restricted to sample rates of 96kHz and below. Fig.1 Aurender Flow, pcm1 filter, impulse response at 44.1kHz (4ms time window). Fig.2…

CLASSICAL ROCK / POP JAZZ Unlike the conundrum of today’s country music, whose lyrics celebrate family and tradition even as the countrymusic community ignores and disrespects the giants of the music’s past, jazz and rock have for the most part remembered and celebrated their musical pioneers, game changers, and the singular, monumental virtuosity of artists like Billie Holiday. On April 6, the day I finished this review, Billie Holiday, who would have turned 100 in 2015, was inducted into the Apollo Walk of Fame, in Harlem. This honor was presented by Cassandra Wilson, who, just a day after the Apollo ceremony, released her own tribute to the singer, Coming Forth by Day. Among the many other events centered around the Holiday centennial are: a relaunched website, www.BillieHoliday.com; a BBC Radio…

THERE’S ONLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC: THE BLUES AND ZIPPETY DOO-DAH. —TOWNES VAN ZANDT “The music business used to carry a certain amount of brotherly love, but it isn’t that way now.” —JIMMY RUSHING That needle and diaphragm ’bout to steal my soul! From the earliest days of lamp-black paper and wax cylinders, and for a variety of reasons—beginning with a healthy fear of anything calling itself the music business—musicians have cast a wry eye on the entire notion of recording their work. The first battleground was over those fuzzy if nonexistent royalty rates for play, sales, and useage, that continues to this day. Once microphones and electric recording came in, in the mid-1920s, artistes openly kvetched that records could never capture their best performances, while secretly worrying that they’d…