Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Stereophile

It began with a bad outlet. Perhaps two weeks after my husband and visiting friend created several delightful holiday light displays in the living room, one of the living room outlets died. Every time I tried to plug in part of the light show, it, along with the living room sound system and reading lights, lost power. If the Grinch didn’t exactly steal Christmas, he sure tried to guarantee it would arrive silently under the cover of darkness. Evil Grinch proved no match for the visiting electrician. While our savior was here, I tapped his knowledge of the eccentricities of Port Townsend’s electrical grid. When queried about the underground wiring to our house from the transformer across the street, he said, “Given the age of your house [1992], I am…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Simaudio Moon Voice 22’s behavior in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. As the loudspeaker’s manual recommends that the grille be left off for the “best results,” the measured behavior was taken without the grille. The Moon Voice 22’s sensitivity is specified as 89dB/2.83V/m; my B-weighted estimate was inconsequentially lower, at 88dB(B)/2.83V/m. The Voice 22’s nominal impedance is specified as 6 ohms. The speaker’s impedance magnitude (fig.1, solid trace) remains above 6 ohms in the upper midrange and treble, but drops below 4 ohms in the bass and lower midrange, with a minimum value of 3.4 ohms at 184Hz. The electrical phase angle (dotted trace) is occasionally high, which means…

The most meaningful test of a CD player or transport is of how well it deals with disc errors. I examined the Jay’s Audio CDT3-MK3’s performance with the Pierre Verany Digital Test CD, which has tracks with single or double gaps in the data spiral. It successfully played tracks with gaps up to 1mm in length, but when the gap was 1.5mm or longer, there were audible glitches. The Compact Disc standard requires only that a player cope with gaps of up to 0.2mm. The Jay’s transport copes well with damaged CDs. Next, I examined the amount of timing uncertainty—jitter—in the CDT3-MK3’s AES3 output by looking at the datastream’s “eye pattern.” I overlaid successive snapshots of the CDT3-MK3’s AES3 output, taken over a 60s time window, with my Audio Precision…

Sorey, drums; Aaron Diehl, piano; Russell Hall, bass; Greg Osby, alto saxophone Pi P196 (3 CDs, available as download). 2022. Sorey, prod.; Kengchakaj Kengkarnka, recording/mixing eng. There is no one like Tyshawn Sorey. As a jazz drummer, he is at home in the far reaches of the avant-garde. As a composer of contemporary classical music, he gets commissions from major orchestras for his concertos, oratorios, and operas. His extreme eclecticism makes him an enigma (he cites Asian folkloric music and death metal as influences), yet his renown keeps growing. He is ridiculously prolific. The long list of awards he has won includes the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, one of the most coveted prizes in American arts and sciences. The New Yorker once described Sorey as “unpredictable to the point of unnerving.”…

London Symphony Orchestra/François-Xavier Roth LSO Live LSO0833 (CD). Nicholas Parker, prod.; Jonathan Stokes and Neil Hutchinson, engs. For 15 minutes or so, Roth delivers one of the best Zarathustras in a while, a reading marked primarily by restraint. He doesn’t overplay the familiar “sunrise”: The organ pedal point is solid and unobtrusive, the fanfare firm and grand. The divided strings enter cautiously but with silky, vibrant tone. Roth’s speed for track 4 leaves the little notes sounding slightly frazzled, but it surges effectively. The Grablied fugue begins almost too quietly but builds steadily. Riding out of it, Roth nails the sudden upward color shift. But in the forthright Der Genesende, the playing turns slightly nervous, lacking buoyancy; only at the violin solo do things settle, though still without the previous…

Kirsten Edkins, tenor saxophone; Gerald Clayton, piano; Lemar Guillary, trombone; Ahmet Turkmenoglu, bass; Chris Wabich, drums Cohearent Records CR-AV-2201 (LP). 2023. Dave Connor, prod.; Kevin Gray, Ryan Wirthlin, engs. New, genuinely audiophile recordings may be a small slice of the musical pie, but within that frame, Shapes and Sound from saxophonist/composer Kirsten Edkins is high profile. That’s because Shapes and Sound is the first release from Kevin Gray’s new Cohearent Records, recorded in his new studio, built by hand next door to his mastering facility in North Hills, California. The label carries the slogan, “All-valve from microphones to cutterhead.” To fans of tubes, that’s sheer poetry. Shapes and Sound is the sophomore album for saxophonist Edkins. Of the eight tunes on the album, she composed six. Leading a quartet, which…

Vee Jay/Craft Recordings CR00544 (LP). 2023. No prod. or eng. listed. Though it’s often forgotten in the wake of Motown’s success, there was also a blues scene in Detroit in which no one loomed larger than John Lee Hooker. Cut at a single session in 1962 in Chicago, Burnin’ has been reissued by Craft on 180gm vinyl. Hooker, who began his career playing solo, rockin’ joints with his upbeat crowd pleasers put over by his growling vocal delivery, decided here to play with a group of musicians imported from Detroit, including Benny “Papa Zita” Benjamin and the great James Jamerson, the two most famous and talented members of the legendary house band at Motown, The Funk Brothers. Also on the record are Hank Cosby and Andrew “Mike” Terry on tenor…

Matador Records OLE1929 (LP). 2023. Yo La Tengo, prod.; James McNew, eng. Age has privileges and advantages. Nearing 40 years together, Yo La Tengo has earned the trust and freedom to write and play whatever they feel or want to say. Over the years, they’ve explored most avenues, from soul to indie pop, laconic country to outright noise. Now nearing 20 albums to their name (depending on how you count collaborations), this most textural of all indie rock bands has made another masterpiece to add to its oeuvre. Following a five-song 2020 pandemic record, We Have Amnesia Sometimes, which seemed like an enjoyable jam tape, guitarist Ira Kaplan, drummer Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew have returned on This Stupid World, an LP whose sonics vary from deliberately noisy to…

Columbia Records continues to extend its Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, which began in 1991. The latest edition in this complex warren of burrows brings us to Volume 17, Bob Dylan – Fragments – Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996 – 1997). Fragments—the title—feels inaccurate; these recordings are not shards of some missing whole. Rather, they form a single large, varied portrait. To borrow an analogy from art history, what we have here is the result of cleaning and restoring a large canvas, removing layers of varnish and dirt that had obscured the true colors and textures that were there when it was first painted. Now we can experience this masterpiece in a new way. This Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 17 collection combines the original tracks from the 1997 release Time…

Since the 1980s, I’ve been asking every speaker designer I meet, “What amplifier do you recommend using with your speakers?” Annoyingly, they always say, “My speakers are easy to drive. Any amp will do.” Whereupon I’d whine, “Aww, come on man, don’t feed me that. What amp did you use when you were designing the speaker?” The closest any manufacturer came to providing a real answer was Wendell Diller of Magnepan, who, when I reviewed his .7 quasi-ribbon speaker, said, “We used an amp of our own design. It’s not for sale. But any amp that doubles its power into 4 ohms will be fine.” Wendell’s answer helped me choose effective amplification and feel more confident about my conclusions. Unlike loudspeaker manufacturers, headphone manufacturers know that which amp a reviewer…

I measured one of the Karan POWERa Mono amplifiers that JVS auditioned, serial number 005. Because the amplifier was too wide to fit through the door from my listening room to the corridor that leads to the test lab, I performed the measurements in my listening room. To ensure that this very powerful amplifier wasn’t starved of wall current, I ran two long, heavy-duty extension cords to the Karan from the 20A circuit in the test lab. I measured the amplifier using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 plugged into one of the extension cords. Following distributor Wynn Wong’s recommendation, I performed the measurements with the DC filter on the amplifier’s rear panel switched on; however, I didn’t measure any differences with this filter on or off. (I live in a…

Back in the ’50s, Cesare Sanavio, then a new electronics graduate with a specialty in output transformers for tube amplifiers, began his career in radio and television, traveling to various locations outside his native Italy to apply his expertise. Eventually he settled in Paraguay and started designing tubed sound systems for public installations, teaching his son Luciano the art. A few years later, Sanavio and his family returned to Italy. There, he worked as a consultant to several hi-fi companies. Finally, in 1994, drawing on decades of accumulated knowledge of tube-amplifier design and manufacturing, and a particular focus on output transformers of the highest quality, Cesare Sanavio and his two sons, Luciano and Lorenzo, formed Mastersound. When Cesare Sanavio died, Lorenzo and Luciano continued operations. In 2015, the company re-formed,…

I measured the Arvus H2-4D with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 I connected the H2-4D’s Ethernet port to my network and used the unit’s GUI to set the processor’s output configuration to “5.1.2,” to make sure there was no DSP being used, and to set its volume control to the maximum. Initially, the data source was the HDMI output of my Roon Nucleus+, and playback was with the Roon 2.0 app, which recognized the Arvus as an ALSA device. However, concerned that I was getting anomalous results with data sampled at rates higher than 48kHz and bit depths greater than 16, I repeated the testing with the HDMI output of my 2017 MacBook Pro, using the VLC Player, Adobe Audition, and Pure Music apps. I used the Tascam–pin-out DB25-XLR snake…

Herb Reichert reviewed the Mojo Mystique X SE very favorably in Stereophile’s April 2023 issue.1 While he found that the dCS Bartók DAC made piano recordings sound crisper and more dramatic, “sounding bigger, tighter, and more forceful through the piano’s left-hand octaves” than they did through the Mystique X SE, “Mojo’s Mystique X SE … disappeared from my listening awareness more than any DAC I’d previously encountered.” He concluded that this nonoversampling (NOS) D/A processor “produced a unique, sophisticated listening experience that presented digital recordings as beautiful, probing, and engaging.” In my measurements, I found that while the Mojo processor offered low levels of harmonic and intermodulation distortion and good channel separation, those characteristics were paired with relatively high levels of jitter-related artifacts through all three digital inputs—AES3, coaxial S/PDIF,…

In 1955, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould surprised executives at Columbia Masterworks by choosing J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for his debut recording. His performance was fast and fluid and sparkling and delicious, and it was an astonishingly big seller. In 1981, Gould came full circle and recorded the Goldbergs again. It was his last studio recording. That second attempt could not be more different from the first: relentlessly intellectual, percussive, insistent. Outtakes from the 1955 sessions were released by Sony in 2018. Late last year, to honor what would have been Gould’s 90th birthday, Sony put out a package with a full-color coffee table book and 10 CDs of unreleased outtakes from the 1981 sessions—The Goldberg Variations: The Complete Unreleased 1981 Studio Sessions—with an 11th disc containing the 1981 album. This…

Alexander Melnikov, keyboards Harmonia Mundi 902702 (24/96 WAV). 2023. Martin Sauer, prod.; Benedikt Schröder, eng. On the face of it, Alexander Melnikov’s Fantasie: 7 Composers, 7 Keyboards is an audiophile’s dream. A follow-up to keyboard genius Melnikov’s marvelous 2018 Harmonia Mundi recital, Four Pieces, Four Pianos, it presents the keyboard fantasies of seven great composers, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Alfred Schnittke, on seven very different-sounding historic instruments. Each of the instruments, which range from a copy of Hans Ruckers II’s two-manual harpsichord from 1624 (rebuilt c. 1720) to a Steinway & Sons Model D-274 piano from 2014, produces the sound the composer likely expected to hear. Superbly recorded in the ideal acoustic of the famed Teldex Studio Berlin, Fantasie is an excellent test for the timbral accuracy, resolution, speed,…

Ambrosetti, flugelhorn; Uri Caine, piano; Scott Colley, bass; Peter Erskine, drums; John Scofield, guitar; 22-piece string orchestra Enja ENJ-9811-2 (hybrid SACD). 2022. Jeff Levenson, prod.; Jim Anderson, eng. The SACD format, especially in 5.1 channels, is a small, specialized niche in the audiophile world. But for those with systems capable of playing Nora in 5.1 surround, a special sensory and aesthetic experience awaits. Swiss trumpet player Franco Ambrosetti has always wanted to make a recording with strings. With this album, recorded at age 80, he didn’t just fulfill his dream; he went first class. Prestigious collaborators (see above) were brought in. Conductor Alan Broadbent created arrangements for a 22-piece string orchestra. Renowned engineer Jim Anderson, an authority on “immersive sound,” recorded and mixed it. The set list includes diverse works…

Atlantic Records (16/44.1 FLAC stream/Qobuz). 2023. Carlos de la Garza, prod.; Harriet Tam, eng. Coming nearly six years after Tennessee-based Paramore’s previous album, This Is Why is a welcome arrival. Lead singer Hayley Williams made two solo albums in the intervening years, which partially explains the band’s studio silence. It’s good to hear Williams collaborating again with guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro on this latest effort. As with the band’s first five albums, the main influences continue to be punk and indie rock. But here the sonic ingenuity is enhanced at the hands of producer Carlos de la Garza and engineer Harriet Tam, who create a relief map of intense textures. Shimmering distortion on the guitars on “Crave” contrasts the clarity of the drum-kit sound. The natural resonance…

Several traditional hi-fi dealerships have shuttered in recent years: NYC’s Lyric Hi-Fi1 and Chicago’s Audio Consultants are prominent examples. A few new brick-and-mortar shops have opened, but it’s rare to see a next-generation owner breathe new life into a long-established dealership. Christopher Brewer is doing exactly that. New England Hi-Fi was founded as the New England Music Company by Derek R. Burt,2 in 1965—on the early side of hi-fi’s heyday. Back then, the store carried the 1965 KLH line and other pioneering products, with a self-proclaimed emphasis on customer service. Founded in downtown Portland, Maine, the dealership moved to Scarborough in 1984 and then to South Portland, in a corner space across from the Maine Mall. Before he became the owner, Brewer was an employee. Before he was an employee,…

It turns out that PVC, or polyvinyl chloride—the stuff used to make Starbucks gift cards, imitation leather wallets, inflatable pool unicorns, the pipes under your sink, and Billy Idol’s pants—is also the main ingredient in phonograph records. And today we’re living in the silver age of PVC. Not the golden age, since records are no longer the dominant medium for recorded music, but these days we’re lucky to again have access to a remarkable amount of music stamped on top-quality hot plastic. Better still, as listeners have become more knowledgeable and demanding, vinyl releases have become more scrupulously sourced, pressed, annotated, and packaged. Many of today’s records show an unprecedented level of care and transparency about their production—and sound terrific to boot. Some of these new records happen to contain…

I’m picturing a gaggle of cigar-chomping Simaudio execs in an office discussing what to do about the fact that their high-end amplification lines have become so successful that their names have become synonymous with the company. “In the ’90s, people thought our company was called Celeste,” one floor-pacing exec says, speaking for everyone in the room. “Now they think we’re called Moon! How do we fix this?” After much debate, a member shouts: “We add ‘by Simaudio’ at the end!” The execs hoot, holler, and slap the conference-room table—and thus is born Moon by Simaudio. A fictional account? Sure, but, as they say in the movies, it’s based on a true story. In fact, I intended it as a sort of parable, the message being that we humans always seek…

I performed the measurements of the Mastersound Compact 845 amplifier with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system.1 The tubes were installed when I received the review sample, and I waited for an hour after powering up the amplifier before starting the testing. The Mastersound runs hot—after an hour the temperature of the top panel in front of the line-stage tubes was 115.9°F/46.6°C. The Compact 845 inverted polarity from both the 4 ohm and 8 ohm output transformer taps with the balanced and single-ended inputs but preserved absolute polarity from its Direct inputs, which bypass the preamplifier stage and volume control. The voltage gain at 1kHz from the unbalanced Direct inputs was 23.1dB from the 8 ohm tap and 20.7dB from the 4 ohm tap, both figures into 8 ohms. From the…

They say a jack of all trades is the master of none. While this expression is typically used to describe people, it also works for machines that play 5" optical discs. The Compact Disc was launched in 1982, but the four decades since have seen an alphabet soup of similar-looking shiny discs including major formats like DVD, SACD, DVD-A, and Blu-ray Audio. As each new format arrived, hardware manufacturers scrambled to keep up, developing machines that could play just about any disc you could throw at them (or, rather, insert in them). The result was a bunch of “jack of all trades” disc spinners like the deservedly popular Oppos, which some boutique manufacturers then used as a base unit to create their own multiple format players. But what if we…

FEW PEOPLE MAKE ALBUMS ABOUT isolation and loneliness sound as appealing as John Doe does. That’s what Doe has achieved with his latest solo release, Fables in a Foreign Land (LP, Fat Possum FP 18001). Set as a song cycle in the 1890s, the album’s 13 songs reflect Doe’s penchant for dust-and-diesel storytelling, within an acoustic-trio format. It’s “telling stories and playing music around the modern campfire,” Doe said in an interview. Doe’s mining of what some call the “dark folk” vein during the latter portion of his solo career hearkens back to his roots in X, the Los Angeles–bred iconoclast punk band he co-founded in 1977. Though X could be raw and confrontational, the band had killer vocal harmonies and a rockabilly-tinged sonic edge. X caught the eye and…

Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, also known as Jaws, was a self-taught originator of soul jazz. He recorded the first records that blend Hammond organ and tenor sax, with Bill Doggett at the B3, for Roost Records in May 1952. He continued to develop his blues-based, jukebox-friendly style of jazz and, in 1955, joined forces with a young organ player from Philadelphia named Shirley Scott. They recorded together for King and Prestige Records and formed a gigging band with drums and bass. In three 1958 sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack, New Jersey, “living room” studio, Davis and Scott recorded four seminal soul-jazz albums, the “Cookbooks.” Themed around bluesy originals and spirited takes on comfortable standards, the albums featured liner notes and song titles that relate to an imagined soul kitchen, with…

Danish National Symphony Orchestra/Fabio Luisi Deutsche Grammophon 00028948634811 (16/44.1WAV). 2023. Bernhard Güttler, prod.; Mikkel Nymand, eng. The second symphony, with its depiction of the four classical “humors” in conventional, easily grasped structures, is the most readily accessible Nielsen symphony. For the maestro, though, it’s harder: The busy, almost pointillist scoring requires skilled balancing, and it presents a notorious conducting trap that isn’t avoided even in some major productions. Luisi is up to the challenges, as we know from the incisive opening address. The gentler following transition, and the plaintive oboe solo, bespeak a taut, characterful first movement with an occasional rhetorical touch. Luisi avoids the trap at the start of the “phlegmatic” second movement—though the scansion is correctly ambiguous—which is controlled yet easygoing. The main theme of the Andante malinconico,…

Stenson, piano; Anders Jormin, bass; Jon Fält, drums, percussion ECM 2775 (CD). 2023. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Stefano Amerio, eng. Bobo Stenson may be the most under-recognized great pianist in jazz. He was essential to the aura of mystical lyricism that prevailed on Charles Lloyd’s first five ECM albums. That partnership ended more than 20 years ago. Stenson has been leading his own trios on ECM for 50-plus years. His current trio, with bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Fält, released Cantando in 2008, Indicum in 2012, and Contra La Indecision in 2018. Now there is Sphere. It is impossible to rank these four recordings. All are magical. All convey a sense of concentrated, timeless purity, as if they were preserved in amber. But Sphere is the quietest and the most…

Smith, tenor saxophone; Taylor Eigsti, piano, Fender Rhodes; Matt Stevens, guitar; Harish Raghavan, bass; Kendrick Scott, drums; two guests Blue Note B003704402 (16/44.1 WAV). 2023. Smith, prod.; Chris Allen, eng. Walter Smith III has been coming up in the world. Most people first heard of him when he occupied the tenor saxophone chair in one of the most important jazz groups of the new millennium, Ambrose Akinmusire’s quintet. But Smith has played with other prominent leaders (Terence Blanchard, Christian Scott) and has been making records under his own name since 2006. Most recently have come three well-received albums by a project called In Common, co-led by Smith and Matt Stevens. Now Smith has crossed a threshold that proves a jazz musician has arrived: He has been signed by the Blue…

Warner 0825646253012 (1 LP, 2 CD, 2 DVD, Book) New Order, Rich Osborn & Trish Macgregor, prod.; Michael Johnson, eng. Power, Corruption and Lies (1983) is regarded by many as New Order’s masterpiece. Well, maybe so, but the album that followed it, Low-Life, is pretty damn tasty, too. Incorporating more synths, they built on the success of the single “Blue Monday,” combining post-punk and dance music. Here, Low-Life gets the super-deluxe treatment, similar to what that previous album received in 2020. The price is the price, and it isn’t cheap, but you get a lot for your money. First there’s the lush packaging—positively a work of art—and then there is an impressive book, featuring photos and interviews with the band describing the growth of each song. The band’s Mancunian wit…