Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i Stereophile

At noon on a cloudless, ridiculously bright 97° day, John Atkinson and I auditioned Audeze’s new-but-not-yet-released CRBN electrostatic headphones. The audition took place at a sneak preview hosted by Audeze’s principal, Sankar Thiagasamudram, in a sleeping room at New York’s hipster-chic Ace Hotel on 29th Street and Broadway. Décor in this unusual sleeping room included a bathtub with feet, an antique wood ironing board, a vintage Gibson guitar, and a working stereo system with a Music Hall turntable and an assortment of vintage LPs. On my way there, I was remembering some of my lifetime experiences with electrostatic transducers. People who know me know that I’ve always been partial to electrostatic loudspeakers and headphones, but I’ve never found any that engage me fulltime, long-term. Over the years, my two pairs…

Usually when I measure an amplification or digital product, I carry the box down the stairs to my basement, where I have my listening room and test lab. However, the Accustic Arts AMP V was too heavy for me to do this. Instead, I rolled it in its wheeled flightcase into the vestibule outside the listening room, removed the flightcase cover, and left the amplifier sitting in the flightcase1 at the top of the small flight of stairs. I then set up my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It2”) with its dedicated PC, my analog and digital oscilloscopes, test loads, etc, at the foot of the stairs. The amplifier’s two AC leads were plugged into the closest wall socket, along with those for the…

I used my Audio Precision SYS27221 to examine the Jadis JS1 MkV’s performance. To minimize the possibility of the analog circuitry picking up noise from the power supply, I placed the supply on the floor, as far away from the processor chassis as the two umbilical cables would allow. The heatsinks on the back of the supply became very hot during testing, their temperature stabilizing at 135.3°F (57.4°C). The processor’s AES3 and optical and coaxial S/PDIF inputs locked to data sampled up to 192kHz. Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that the USB inputs accepted 32-bit integer data sampled at rates up to 768kHz. Apple’s USB Prober utility identified the JS1 MkV as “Combo384 Amanero” from “Amanero Technologies\000,” with the serial number string “414-001.” (Amanero Technologies is an Italian company that manufactures…

SUTHERLAND ENGINEERING LITTLE LOCO MK2 PHONO STAGE Sutherland Engineering’s Ron Sutherland has been building highly respected conventional RC-type phono stages since the first settlements at Jericho. But in 2018, on the urging of a friend, he developed a current-drive/transimpedance phono stage and thought it was crazy-good, so he called it the Phono Loco. As I recall, the Phono Loco arrived to a fanfare of praise and curiosity, but it cost a lot ($8200), and a lot of audiophiles were skeptical about its unusual (but not unprecedented) current-mode operation and its need for balanced tonearm leads. This latter condition was a deal-breaker for many (including me) who struggled to comprehend the benefits of current-drive and were already invested in and satisfied with voltage-amplifying phono stages and step-up transformers. According to the…

Tattoo You is near and dear to me. It came out in August 1981, just before I entered 10th grade, the age when a person’s rock’n’roll aesthetic begins to take shape. This album was formative. I knew about the Rolling Stones mainly through the Hot Rocks compilation, from listening on radio to hits from Some Girls (which came out when I was too young and sheltered in leafy suburbia to understand the urban grit and decadence described in its lyrics), and from Emotional Rescue, which I owned, and which I thought (and still think) lacks interesting music in the grooves to match the cool cover. I figured the Stones might already be too old to rock. Tattoo You proved me wrong and rocketed the Stones into the MTV ’80s. From…

JULIAN LAGE Squint Julian Lage, guitar; Jorge Roeder, bass; Dave King, drums Blue Note (CD, LP). 2021. Margaret Glaspy, Armand Hirsch, prods.; Mark Goodell, eng. I’ve been late in catching on to Julian Lage, the 33-year-old jazz guitarist who’s been raising a lot of eyebrows. After recently seeing him play twice in three days at the Village Vanguard, where he displayed extraordinary virtuosity, swing, blues, and range, I’m now listening to his albums. (The two gigs were with John Zorn’s New Masada Quartet and in duets with pianist Fred Hersch.) Count me among the eyebrow-raisers. Lage is a phenom, and not the sort who flashes technique for its own sake. Everything he does is in service to the music. (On a few albums as a sideman, he has graced the…

You may be moving to Montana. Acoustic Signature is not an overnight sensation, nor are its turntables driven by dental floss. If you’re not a Frank Zappa fan, you probably have no idea what any of that means, so please Google it. I’ll wait till you get back. The German company is headquartered in picturesque Süssen not far from Stuttgart, one of the country’s automobile capitals. Porsche and Mercedes-Benz are headquartered there. It has been around for 25 years, specializing in exquisitely machined, high-mass, nonsuspended turntable designs, manufactured in-house. With companies moving to electric cars, you can be sure that, should the company need any, there’s no shortage of superskilled machinists in the picturesque valley known as the “Stuttgart Cauldron.” The Acoustic Signature turntable line has expanded over the years,…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system, a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone, and an Earthworks microphone preamplifier to measure the Bowers & Wilkins 804 D4’s frequency response in the farfield. My primary axis for the measurements was level with the tweeter, but I also performed a series of tests on an axis level with the midrange unit, which is 36" from the floor, the height of my ears in my listening chair. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield and in-room responses. Bowers & Wilkins specifies the 804 D4’s anechoic sensitivity as 89dB/2.83V/m. My B-weighted estimate was the same. The 804 D4’s impedance is specified as 8 ohms, with a minimum value of 3 ohms. The solid trace in fig.1 indicates that the impedance magnitude, measured with Dayton Audio’s…

It had been a while since I’d done any serious, critical listening through headphones. That changed when Editor Jim Austin asked if I wanted to review the iFi Audio ZEN Signature Set ($599). Figuring I could use more Zen in my life, I agreed. UK-based iFi Audio, which operates under the auspices of the Abbington Global Group, has released several compact products in its ZEN series: DACs, headphone amps, a Bluetooth receiver, and a network streamer. Available in two iterations, the iFi Audio ZEN Signature Set consists of two boxes in a single cardboard sleeve: the ZEN DAC Signature (upgraded to V2 status mere weeks after the V1 release) and one of two versions of the ZEN CAN Signature headphone amplifier: either the ZEN CAN Signature 6XX, or the ZEN…

At 90 years of age, Sofia Gubaidulina has honed her musical language amidst conflict. Since 2003, the profoundly religious, visionary, and visceral Russian composer has written three huge, prescient works that depict in musical terms a standoff between God and humankind. All receive their world premiere “live” recordings in this sensational-sounding, system-demanding outpouring from Andris Nelsons and the venerable orchestra that Felix Mendelssohn once led, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. Gubaidulina, whom Nelsons appointed Gewandhaus’s composer-in-residence through 2022, has been working with the conductor since he and the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered her Triple Concerto in 2017. Both the recording’s opening work—Gubaidulina’s third violin concerto, Dialogue: I and You—and its tour de force companion for huge orchestra, The Wrath of God, received inspiration from her oratorio, On Love and Hatred. According to…

THE REPLACEMENTS Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (Deluxe Edition) Rhino R2 659038 (4CD/1LP). 2021. Peter Jesperson, Paul Westerberg, Steve Fjelstad, prods./various engs. (INTENTIONALLY LO-FI) The Replacements have a great rock’n’roll Formation Story: Four rough-and-tumble Minneapolis kids, in and out of trouble, bitten by the music bug and headed for either stardom or dead ends. They chose to go all in and make this debut album, which is still heating the blood 4 decades on. Front-man Paul Westerberg sums up the spirit of Sorry, Ma … in band biographer Bob Mehr’s booklet essay. Years of “playing with guys in garages, basements … (and at) keggers” finally led him to brothers Bob (guitar) and Tommy (bass) Stinson and drummer Chris Mars. Westerberg: “It took me a long time to…

WAM Engineering Thank you, Michael Fremer, for your review of the WAM Engineering Cartridge Analysis service and corrective alignment shim in the December issue. Over the last year, we have compiled a lot of data on the quality of stylus/cantilever assembly construction and, unfortunately, the results are disappointing. The variations we have measured in stylus rake angle and zenith error are too often so far off from ideal that no amount of twisting of the cartridge in the headshell or rake correction from a custom shim can correct the problem. Though we haven’t analyzed all our data yet, our guesstimate is that the average zenith error is somewhere between ±2.2°–2.6° and the average rake error is even more. What’s more, the variation in our dataset is large: We’ve seen zenith…

Ortofon had hoped to introduce its new MC Verismo “in person” at one of last fall’s North American shows, but those shows never took place. COVID necessitated instead an October 30 live Facebook introduction, the company’s first such premier. The next day, AnalogPlanet posted an exclusive interview with Leif Johannsen, the cartridge’s designer and Ortofon’s chief officer of acoustics and technology.1 Those familiar with Ortofon’s MC A95 (reviewed here in May and June 2015) will recognize the new cartridge’s “platform shoe” shape, which was created using Selective Laser Melting (SLM) technology to produce a titanium body that’s impossible to produce in the same shape and density using standard CNC machining. The Verismo has a very similar shape, but it’s bigger than the A95. The new shape also has visual elements…

The $50,000, 176lb Accustic Arts AMP V (pronounced Amp Five) is the heaviest, tallest, most powerful, most expensive stereo amp to enter my audio system. With rated power of 900Wpc into 8 ohms, 1360Wpc into 4 ohms, and 1500Wpc into 2 ohms, the AMP V, which stands proud at the top of the Accustic Arts amplifier line, surpasses my reference D’Agostino Progression M550’s rated power into 4 ohms by 260Wpc.1 What, if anything, might those extra 260Wpc—and those extra pounds of transformer and heat-dissipating metal—mean sonically in my moderately sized listening room? I was determined to find out. The AMP V is one of the quietest amps I’ve ever heard. Rock the joint “I listen mainly to rock and a few classical tracks—for example, The Planets,” AMP V designer Sebastian…

“Resolution can be a tricky thing when it comes to digital,” my friend Michael Lavorgna recently told me. “Too much, and my focus shifts from music to sound; too little, and I become less engaged.” Lavorgna, a visual artist and proprietor of the online audio-and-music publication Twittering Machines,1 is one of my favorite people to talk to about records, books, art, and hi-fi. We’ve What Michael said about resolution mirrored my own experience but nagged at me. If resolution is a good thing, then how can there be too much of it? After thinking about it for a while, I realized that he was on to something. Designing an audio component is less like building a suspension bridge and more like cooking a pot of chili: You balance ingredients in…

I enjoy few things more than setting up a turntable. Whether it’s for myself or for a friend—whether it’s a budget model with a layered MDF plinth and nonadjustable tonearm, or a megabuck, state-of-the-art behemoth—I relish the ritual. Back in the day, I used to huff and puff, scream and shake, thanks to the heebie-jeebies I’d get when attempting to raise a turntable to ultimate performance. But with experience comes wisdom. My buddy and Sound & Vision contributor Michael Trei makes turntable setup look like child’s play. I’ve learned by watching Mike that, when a turntable setup tries your patience, the thing to do is keep calm and carry on. Once you’ve dialed in all the setup parameters, including leveling, cartridge alignment, azimuth, tracking force, and VTA, you can savor…

I measured the iFi ZEN CAN’s and ZEN DAC Signature’s performance with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 As We See It1). Looking first at the ZEN CAN, I measured two versions. One, labeled “6XX,” with the serial number 5501000735, included equalization for specific Sennheiser headphones. The other, labeled “HFM,” with the serial number 5312001087, included equalization for specific HiFiMan headphones. Other than the equalization, the two versions of the ZEN CAN measured identically. The maximum gain for unbalanced input signals was 0dB, 6dB, 12dB, or 18dB, as specified, from the single-ended headphone output and 6dB higher in each case from the balanced headphone output. Both the balanced and unbalanced outputs preserved absolute polarity (ie, were noninverting). The unbalanced input impedance of both samples was >400k ohms…

R&B in D.C. 1940-1960 (Bear Family BCD 17052 16-CD, 2021) adds a new chapter to the Bear Family Records deep dive into American popular culture. Historian/collector Jay Bruder worked with a small army of researchers and editors to compile the beautifully designed book and its accompanying 16-CD discography. The box unearths an obscure story about the musical history of the Black population in the nation’s capital between the era of big band swing jazz and early rock’n’roll. Though the music part of the package covers only about two decades—the last recording date is 1962—the history goes back to the end of the 19th century. One of the great ironies of the story is that very little music was recorded in the District of Columbia due to lack of a music-business…

FANNY MENDELSSOHN, STRING QUARTET; FELIX MENDELSSOHN, STRING QUARTETS 2, 6 Takács Quartet Hyperion CDA 68330 (CD). 2021. Judith Sherman, prod.; Mike Quam, eng. The big surprise is Fanny Mendelssohn’s Quartet: Hyperion released another recording just two years ago, but here it sounds a stronger piece. The Takács, with its firm bowings, full-bodied tone, and precise intonation, find stature in it that eluded the estimable Nash Ensemble. The first movement, melting and incisive by turns, still sounds like a warmup for the second, a bouncy scherzo relieved by legato and contrapuntal passages. The Romanze, more intricate than I’d remembered, still sings simply; violinist Edward Dusinberre’s pinpoint tuning makes his high lines soar. And the players smoothly elide the moto perpetuo finale’s bustling first theme into the second’s accompaniment, maintaining buoyancy as…

Back in the mid-1960s, I was the unusual white, suburban preteen who, for reasons I’ve long pondered and never fully understood, was drawn much less powerfully to the Beatles than to blues and R&B. I was a bit of a jazz snob, too. Given these leanings, it’s no surprise that one of the half-dozen or so albums that fried my impressionable young brain was that seamless blend of blues, R&B, and jazz, Ray Charles at Newport. Though it was cut on July 5, 1958, at the still-new jazz festival, for some reason I always had the year at ’57 and didn’t realize my error until recently; I had barely ever glanced at the liner notes, so riveted was I on the front cover: His Own Bad Self in a shiny…