Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i Stereophile

THIS ISSUE: It’s time for a paradigm shift. For the longest time, I’ve found the label “hobby” inadequate to describe the audiophile goal of better sound reproduction. Yes, for some, the mechanics of the High End have become an end in themselves—a way to tinker and tweak, build and rebuild in classic hobby faction. But for many others, specifically earbud listeners, folks with whole-house systems, and those who’d rather push a button on a remote and sit back or dance rather than roll tubes or tinker, the descriptor hobby falls woefully short. Recent conversations with high-resolution advocate Marc Finer, of the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG, www.degonline.org) and Stream the Studio (www.streamthestudio.news); Meredith Gabor, of cable manufacturer Nordost; and Craig Allison, of retailer Lavish HiFi, in Santa Rosa, California helped clarify…

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 October 2017 issue is July 20, 2017. GERMANY: MUNICH Jason Victor Serinus MQA, whose codec reduces the bandwidth required to stream highresolution files while promising improved sound quality,1 announced at Munich High End (May 18–21) that its hardware partners now include Audio- Quest, CanEver Audio, dCS, Esoteric, IAG, Krell, Lumin, Mark Levinson, Pro-Ject Audio Systems, Simaudio Moon, TEAC, and Wadax. These are in addition to its partners already on board, which include Aurender, Bel Canto Design, Bluesound, Cary, NAD, Brinkmann, Meridian, MSB, Mytek, Onkyo, Pioneer, Technics, and Tidal. Of special interest to budget-conscious audiophiles was AudioQuest’s free firmware update…

THIS ISSUE: A classic MC cartridge updated and an artisanal step-up transformer. H ow can you tell a classic product from the hi-fi hoi polloi? One sure sign is when third-party developers spring up around the thing, offering parts and service intended to maximize its performance—or just to keep it on the road. Thus regarded, a few true classics emerge: Quad’s ESL and ESL-63 loudspeakers. Altec’s 802 and 806 compression drivers. The Linn LP12 and Garrard 301/401 turntables. The Rega RB-300 tonearm and its direct descendants. Younger than some of the above and a lot less British than most is the Denon DL-103 phono cartridge, which has been in continuous production since 1962—and which only recently seems to be getting its due from the consumer-audio rank and file. One reason…

As with the Hegel Music Systems Mohican, which we reviewed in the May issue, the Bryston BCD-3 has no digital inputs of any kind. This limited my measurement of its technical behavior to using 16-bit test files burned to a CD-R. (I sometimes had to eject and reload a CD-R several times before the BCD-3 would play it.) I tested the Bryston with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4). The Bryston’s error correction was excellent—no glitches were apparent in the player’s output until the single gaps in the data spiral on the Pierre Verany Digital Test CD reached 2mm in length, or the closely spaced double gaps reached 1.5mm. (The Compact Disc standard, the so-called “Red Book,” requires only that a player…

“What are you doing for your 40th?”, everyone asked. We thought about it and decided that since we aren’t wild about lavish cakes (although we do love a tasty fastelavnsbolle), we’d celebrate a little differently. Even the thought of making new speakers makes us warm and fuzzy, so that’s what we chose to do. Meet the Special Forty: hygge for your ears. Laurels aren’t for resting on, which is why we gave Dynaudio Labs free rein to play. (It gave our accountants a heart attack). Our only instruction: take our classic tech and see what you’d do differently this time. Their design was nothing short of genius. They took our classic Esotar 28mm soft-dome tweeter design, put our DSR* precision coating on it and then machined an aerodynamic vent into…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophilesocieties. If you’d like to have your audio-society 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, July 26, 7–9pm: The Arizona Audio Video Club will hold its monthly meeting at LMC Home Entertainment Ltd. (1705 W. Ruby Drive, Suite 109, Tempe 85284, www.lmche.com). The LMC stores feature top-line gear from Audio Research, Burmester, JL Audio, Linn, Magnepan, MBL, McIntosh, Sonus Faber, Wilson Audio, and many more. The meeting will highlight the store’s recently completed home theater and the new Homage line of loudspeakers…

THIS ISSUE: The expensive JPS Labs Abyss AB-1266 Phi headphones might be the best value in perfectionist audio. Recently, a friend played me a masterpiece: Ike & Tina Turner’s River Deep—Mountain High, arranged by Jack Nitzsche and produced by Phil Spector (LP, A&M SP 4178). It sounded terrible: murky, distant, with badly booming bass. Even before the first track was over, we both laughed and called it a night. Nevertheless, I went home obsessed with Tina’s inspired singing and Spector’s infamous Wall of Sound production. I have forever lusted for Tina Turner . . . but now, my nerdy old reviewer self wanted to use this dense, soulful recording to bring back my teen testosterone, and also (don’t laugh) to use it as a tool to judge how well an…

I f Stereophile gave an award for Loudspeaker We’ve Most Frequently Reviewed, the hands-down winner would have to be the Quad ESL. The list of past and present Stereophile contributors who’ve written about the ESL’s various incarnations includes John Atkinson, Martin Colloms, Anthony H. Cordesman, Art Dudley, Larry Greenhill, J. Gordon Holt, Ken Kessler, Dick Olsher, Herb Reichert, William Sommerwerck, Steven Stone, and Sam Tellig. The ESL-63 was John Atkinson’s personal “Editor’s Choice” in 1992, and the ESL-989, a successor to the ESL-63, was Stereophile’s 2003 Loudspeaker of the Year and Product of the Year. As acclaimed as it was for its sound, the ESL-63 also acquired a reputation for unreliability. Quad has had spotty distribution in the US, and for several years had no US distribution at all. That…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Rockport Avior II’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and in-room responses. A complication was that the 220-lb loudspeaker was too bulky for me to move it outside for the testing, or to lift it onto my computer-controlled turntable. I therefore had to do the quasi-anechoic measurements in my listening room, where the proximity of room boundaries led to more than usually aggressive windowing of the timedomain data, which in turn reduced the graphs’ resolution in the midrange. My estimate of the Rockport’s voltage sensitivity was 89dB/2.83V/m, slightly higher than the specified 88dB. Fig.1 shows how the Avior II’s impedance magnitude and electrical phase angle varied with frequency. There’s…

I measured the two-channel version of the Emotiva XPA Gen3 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4). Before performing any tests, I ran it at 100Wpc into 8 ohms for an hour. (With a class-AB or -B amplifier, one-third full power is when the heat dissipation in the output devices is at its maximum.) At the end of that time, the louvers on the top panel above the two circuit boards were hot, at 134.4°F (56.9°C), though the rest of the exterior case was cooler. This may be an inexpensive amplifier, but it has adequate heatsinking for its power rating, though this might be due to the fact that the case can hold up to seven amplification modules rather than the two…

EDITOR’S PICK RECORDING OF THE MONTH RACHMANINOFF Piano Sonata 2, Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Six Moments Musicaux Evelina Vorontsova, piano STH Quality Classics CD1416092 (CD). 2017. Paul Steverink, Boudwijn Zwart, prods.; Jaco van Houselt, eng. DDD. TT: 74:42 PERFORMANCE SONICS T his is Russian- Dutch pianist Evelina Vorontsova’s second recording; the first was in 2002. Born in 1972, she took fourth prize in the Rachmaninoff Competition at 18, and second prize at the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition two years later; in 2006, she won second prize in the International Piano and Orchestra Competition in Cantù, Italy (at which there was no first prize awarded). Judging from this CD and its very challenging program, she is a remarkable talent; one wonders why she is not more famous and…

THIS ISSUE: EMIA, Audio MusiKraft, Abyss, Quad, Brinkmann, and Emotiva respond to our reviews of their products. EMIA Phono Editor: I had known Dave Slagle for years, dating back to the era of NY Noise and his high-voltage-exposed-everywhere, clip-lead-connected amp on a kitchen cart. JoeNet, where we “met,” was the place for triode freaks back then. But on this day, in my show room at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, there was a naked autoformer volume control wired backward and duct-taped to a 2x4 four feet above my turntable, serving as an improvised step-up transformer. How had this happened to me? I had somehow followed Dave’s beautifully unconventional logic to this absurd conclusion. In my defense, Frank, whom I highly respect, was also prodding me down this road. It was,…

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. Listening for yourself Editor: I love Stereophile and its level of professionalism. I enjoy both the subjective (reviewer impressions) and objective (John Atkinson’s bench measurements), along with the challenge to “listen for yourself.” I find it amusing that some get caught up in between these angles. Why don’t some trust their ears? What if it’s distortion I like? So what! I don’t know art, but I know what I like. I have no problem living a lie, as long as it’s a good lie! —Bruce Kasprzyk revox77a@gmail.com…

THIS ISSUE: Is noise always unwanted in audio? The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, by Damon Krukowski. The New Press, 2017. Hardcover, 240 pp., $24.95. Also available as an e-book. We find ourselves in a world where signal and noise constantly shift. Defining noise is tricky business. In high-end audio, noise is often defined as the enemy— of music, beauty, truth. Engineers and enthusiasts alike spend significant amounts of time, energy, and money attempting to minimize or control noise so that it has the least possible impact on the source signal: music. In this way—if we are intelligent, careful, and fortunate—we can extract from our stereos cleaner, clearer, more naturally beautiful sound for listening experiences that are enriching, emotionally compelling, and, above all, fun. On the…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Quad ESL-2912’s frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield responses. My estimate of the Quad’s voltage sensitivity was approximately 84dB/2.83V/m, somewhat lower than the specified 86dB. Fig.1 shows how the ESL-2912’s impedance magnitude and electrical phase angle vary with frequency. It’s basically identical to that of the ESL-2912’s predecessor, the ESL-989 (reviewed by Larry Greenhill in November 20021), with a high value in the bass dropping smoothly to a plateau of around 6.5 ohms in the upper midrange, with then a further drop reaching a minimum value of 3.3 ohms at 10kHz. Though the electrical phase angle becomes very inductive between 10 and 20kHz, the impedance magnitude in this octave…

I measured the second sample of the Brinkmann Nyquist with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It,” http://tinyurl.com/4ffpve4), using both the Audio Precision’s optical and electrical digital outputs, and USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro running on battery power with Pure Music 3.0 playing WAV and AIFF testtone files. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the DAC as “Nyquist” from “Brinkmann Audio,” and confirmed that the USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that, via USB, the Nyquist accepted 16- and 24-bit integer data sampled at all rates from 44.1 to 384kHz. The optical input locked to datastreams with sample rates up to 96kHz, the AES/EBU and S/PDIF inputs locked to streams of up to 192kHz-sampled data. The…

THERE’S ONLY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC: THE BLUES AND ZIPPETY DOO-DAH. —TOWNES VAN ZANDT “We’ve had to shapeshift ourselves several times because the industry has changed.We were fully equipped to serve an industry that no longer existed.” --JACK STOUGHTON JR. O nce it was a cherished ritual: come home from the record store, tear off the cellophane, drop the needle, and lose yourself in the artwork, the liner notes, the smell of the jacket’s freshly glued seams. Okay, maybe the glue-sniffing thing was my own particular obsession, but anyone who’s ever bought and played new LPs remembers that the packaging was an integral part of the experience. Even the inner record sleeve was a canvas for artwork. Then there were the inserts and other assorted tchotchkes—posters, paper mustaches, and, in…