Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Stereophile

HIGH END VIENNA 2026 RESCHEDULED FOR JUNE 4–7, 2026 Mark Henninger High End Society has postponed the inaugural Vienna edition of its international audio trade show by a week, citing a scheduling conflict with the Eurovision Song Contest, which the European Broadcasting Union will stage in Austria in late May 2026. The show will now run June 4–7, 2026, at the Austria Center Vienna; it had previously been set for 28–31 May. This will be the first year for the event in Vienna following 21 years at Munich’s MOC Event Center. The Eurovision Song Contest is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors, which was likely to strain local transport and hotel capacity. “To ensure a smooth experience for exhibitors, trade visitors, and the public, we have decided—after thorough consideration—to move…

Forty years ago, when I was a much younger man, I was a strong dude. I recall one day in 1986, soon after I started working at Sound by Singer, when Krell cofounder Dan D’Agostino drove down from his factory in Connecticut to deliver a load of amplifiers and preamps for us to sell. As the new guy, I was expected to do the grunt work. At the time, Krell only made about a half-dozen products, and the KSA-100 was the biggest and heaviest, at around 120lb in the box. After watching me pick up a few KSA-100 amplifiers, heft them onto my shoulder, and carry them downstairs to the stockroom, Dan asked (jokingly, I think) if he could hire me. I doubt I could lift half of that weight…

I measured one of the Diptyque Reference loudspeakers in RvB’s listening room, driving it with his Krell FPB 200c amplifier. I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system with a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to examine the speaker’s behavior in the farfield and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. I managed to maneuver the heavy loudspeaker onto a small dolly for the measurements and positioned it so that it fired along the listening room’s diagonal to push back in time the reflections of the Diptyque’s output from the sidewalls. Nevertheless, the first reflection from the ground still occurred earlier than is usually the case with my testing. I therefore measured the response and dispersion with the microphone at 1m rather than my usual 50". This introduced an additional variable. The…

This review started with a gentle handoff. My ol’ pal Walter Swanbon of Fidelis Distribution stopped by Brooklyn to take away the $10,000 Limited Edition Falcon LS3/5a loudspeakers and drop off the $10,000 eos DAC by Ideon. As he was getting in his car, I yelled, “Walter! I’m warning you! If that thing’s not plug’n’play, I’ll put it right there on that curb.” The eos DAC gripped my attention with startling realism. The day after Walter visited, Jack Wu, the founder of Woo Audio, came by and picked up his beautiful $13,000 WA24 headphone amplifier. As soon as Jack left, at exactly 4:15pm, I set the Ideon eos DAC in the spot the WA24 had occupied. The eos came with no manual and no menu, but on the back I…

I used DRA Labs’ MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone with an Earthworks microphone preamplifier to measure the Volti Audio Lucera’s farfield frequency behavior and dispersion. I used an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses and Dayton Audio’s DATS V2 system to measure the impedance magnitude and electrical phase angle. I took a full set of farfield measurements with the microphone at my usual 50" on the tweeter axis, which is 36" from the floor. Volti specifies the Lucera’s sensitivity as 99dB/2.83V/1m. My B-weighted estimate was slightly lower, at 97.6dB(B)/2.83V/1m, but this sensitivity is still very much higher than average. (Listening tests I organized in the 1990s showed that by reducing the effect of high- and low-frequency extension, a B-weighted sensitivity correlated with a speaker’s perceived loudness.)…

Outside of Vincent Van Gogh, Brian Wilson had the most infamous—and ultimately the most valuable—left ear in the world. Wilson—the chief architect of countless Beach Boys pop classics, who passed away at age 82 on June 11, 2025—lost the hearing in his right ear at an early age.1 One could reasonably argue that he only ever heard all the sonic masterpieces he constructed, for that quintessential California band he cofounded, in mono. In fact, he told me as much during a March 2015 phone interview. “I only have one good ear, so I only hear mono anyway,” he confirmed. “My goal is to try to make the listener know and feel what I sound like—and I know in my head, in my brain, how to do it. Mono was very…

Five decades later, even dedicated fans of former Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower have had to admit that they appreciate his solo albums for more than just his guitar gluttony. To be sure, For Earth Below’s title track and his other blues-rock jams, obviously influenced by both the tone and approach of Jimi Hendrix, are foundational for today’s stoner-rock subgenre. But while Trower wrote the tunes and is the headliner on all his solo albums, including a new 50th anniversary reissue of For Earth Below on Chrysalis Records, time has shown that the most resonant reason to listen to this power trio is James Dewar. A vocalist and bassist from Scotland who was once part of Stone the Crows, Dewar’s soulful voice is one of the most underrated in all…

My Russian neighbor Alex forges ax heads and smokes pig chests 5' from my bedroom window. At 2:00am, shirtless, in February. One especially cold night, I woke up to the sounds of hammering and loud music. When I looked out, Alex was blacksmithing a glowing red meat cleaver blade, with Rachmaninoff plays Rachmaninoff blaring from a cassette in his boom box. I once helped him break into a white-painted chest-high office safe that he bought at auction. After grinding the tips off a dozen long drill bits, we could see inside through a little hole, and there was nothing in it. No metals dealers would haul it away, so we dug a hole by the backyard fence and rolled it in. Unfortunately, the hole wasn’t deep enough, so now, years…

In ancient times, when I first ventured beyond playing files stored on a USB stick or NAS to streaming from Tidal and Qobuz, I ran a USB cable between a MacBook Pro and my DAC. For playback software, I alternated between Amarra, Audirvana, and—sometimes with a dCS DAC—dCS Mosaic. During a decade of upgrades from laptop and DACs with their own streamer software to dedicated server/streamers, some with proprietary music-management and playback software, one basic concern remained consistent: Was there a streamer (or streamer-software combo) out there that could improve musicality and the retrieval of musically important musical detail without making operation kludgy or unduly complex? Soon after Roon’s release, I heralded it as a no-brainer software upgrade for its superb integration of library management, streaming services, and musically enriching…

In high-end audio, Italian designs play by different rules. They tend to favor beauty over austerity, boldness over caution, and emotion over restraint. Rather than just hearing the music, you’re meant to be swept away by it. That spirit animates gear from Unison Research, a tube-focused company located just north of Venice. Founded in 1987 by Giovanni Maria Sacchetti, the brand was taken over in 2000 by audio entrepreneur Giovanni Nasta, who brought it under the umbrella of A.R.I.A.,1 the company that manufactures Opera loudspeakers. Today, five years after Nasta’s untimely death, his sons Bartolomeo and Riccardo helm the operation with their mother Donatella, building gear that feels both personal and ambitious. When I visited the A.R.I.A. facility a couple of years ago, it felt less like a factory than…

I performed a full set of measurements on the Ideon eos using my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 then checked some of the test results with the magazine’s higher-resolution APx555 analyzer. The coaxial S/PDIF inputs accepted data sampled at rates up to 192kHz, while Apple’s AudioMIDI utility revealed that the USB port accepted 16-, 24-, and 32-bit integer data sampled at all rates from 44.1kHz to 768kHz. The USB Prober app identified the Processor as “Ideon USB Audio” from “IDEON AUDIO” and indicated that the USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The Ideon eos preserved absolute polarity from the balanced and unbalanced outputs. The processor’s output levels with a full-scale 1kHz signal and the Output Level set to High via the switch on the rear panel were 9.24V…

My oldest aural memory is my mother singing nursery rhymes to send me off to sleep. After that, it’s vinyl records. Being the third child, I benefited from a constant stream of audio-related hand-me-downs, starting with a 1960s kiddie phonograph and a pile of well-worn records from my older brothers. Aside from welding my consciousness and pleasure sensors to recorded sound, those records formed a common reference root for me, my older brothers, and my younger brother, even though our births spanned 11 years. We all spun the same or similar records when we were little kids.1 By the time I entered fifth grade, I had a Lafayette starter stereo system that included a BSR turntable that was less than brutal (but hardly gentle) on records, and I had started…

Super fans who dig deeper into a favorite artist’s recording catalog eventually come to the crossroads of performance versus sonics. In the case of Sly Stone, who died this past June at age 82, that question has new relevance with the release on CD and vinyl of a “new” Sly and the Family Stone record, The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967. The audio document of an afterhours performance at a teen club in Redwood City, California, that was named after the 1966 novelty hit by the New Vaudeville Band, this performance is described in the liner notes (with slight hyperbole) as: “The grooves are consummate with the state of R&B in early 1967, but the arrangements are different and complex, the routines less facile, the vibe intrinsically creative.”…

Of all the genius-level musical talent to come from Louisiana, few have had more far-reaching influence outside their niche than the singer, songwriter, and marvelous chromatic piano key accordionist Clifton Chenier. A native of Leonville, Louisiana, and the son of a diatonic accordion player, Chenier, who died in 1987, has become a towering figure in American music, best known as the brightest star and most skilled practitioner of zydeco. A collection of songs he wrote or is closely associated with, covered by an array of Americana and roots music performers, A Tribute to the King of Zydeco is intended as a celebration of Chenier’s 100th birthday. Sung primarily in French, zydeco is a blend of blues, R&B, Caribbean, and African influences liberally mixed with what came to be known as…

I think art is the only political power,” the artist Joseph Beuys once said. If only it were true. Often, when power is wielded against an entire people with enough brutality and efficiency, it reduces the culture to a sickening silence, leaving room only for state-sponsored propaganda. Think of the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Germany during the Third Reich. But in other, rarer cases, repression is met with an efflorescence of great art, like a charred field welling up into a riot of wildflowers. Consider what happened in Brazil. In 1964, that country’s armed forces overthrew the leftist president, João Goulart. The plotters’ muscle was provided by the US Navy, Air Force, and the CIA, which aided the coup as part of a clandestine operation known as Brother Sam.…

I performed a complete set of measurements on one of the Unison Research Reference amplifiers (serial number 350072R) with my Audio Precision SYS2722.1 The amplifier preserved absolute polarity with both the balanced and unbalanced inputs and one of the two sets (8 ohm and 4 ohm) of output transformer binding posts. As mentioned in the amplifier’s user manual, the two sets of binding posts are connected in parallel. A rotary knob on the front panel simply acted as an on-off switch. The gain was identical, at a low 16.2dB, with both types of inputs and, unusually, from both output transformer taps. The input impedance is specified as 10k ohms balanced and 47k ohms unbalanced. The balanced input impedance was slightly lower than the specified value, at 7.8k ohms across the…

I measured the Belleson Brilliance phono preamplifier with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system,1 checking some of my findings with the magazine’s APx500 analyzer. I adjusted the preamp’s settings with the app on the supplied Android tablet, which was connected via the preamp’s own Wi-Fi network. To minimize noise, I connected a wire from the grounding terminal on the preamplifier chassis’s rear panel to the analyzer’s ground. I performed the testing primarily with one of the single-ended inputs, as I had understood from TF that that was mostly how he had auditioned the Brilliance. To do so, I pressed in the recessed pushbutton on the rear panel as instructed in the manual, which grounds the shields of the input connectors. I repeated some of the testing with a balanced input, resetting…

As a music teacher, I can think of no better learning experience than what trumpeter Donald Byrd did in the early 1970s for a group of his music students. To quote the band’s current website, “Byrd envisioned taking active students at Howard University in Washington, DC, on a real-world field trip which would expose them to ins and outs of the music business.” Leveraging his music-business connections and salting the adventure with his own compositions, Byrd set his students up as a funky musical act to, in his own words, “bridge the gap between academia and the real world.” The experiment, with vocalist/drummer Keith Killgo, percussionist Pericles “Perk” Jacobs, saxophonist Allan Barnes, guitarist Barney Perry, keyboardist Kevin Toney, and bass guitarist Joe Hall, was an instant success, starting in 1974…

EM/IA 103 SUT Gratitude. We must start these comments, like all things, with gratitude—to Stereophile, for giving a tiny operation like ours some press; to Sound Practices, for turning Dave and me on to all this incredible-sounding triode-and-transformer madness; to J Rob, the godfather; to JC, the attitude adjuster; to Herb Reichert, aka Eddie the Poet, whose writing I first discovered in Sound Practices. In those columns, I learned how I wanted to listen—my intent! Then, major gratitude to the inventors of high-nickel cores at Bell Labs, who taught us so much, an unpayable debt. Gratitude to Edward Christopher Wente, inventor of not just the modern loudspeaker driver but also the condenser microphone, the anechoic chamber, and the founding father of auditorium design. Wente should be a household name; our…