Loading...

Click over to Tekton Design's website and one could infer that I have quit my job, given away all possessions, and joined the church of Tekton in Utah. Of course, I did none of the aforementioned but, with its 99dB of sensitivity, Tekton Design's towering Double Impacts revealed an alternate path to aural enlightenment for... Read More »

The other day a friend of mine with keen ears, though not an audiophile, walked into my living room system and said "Hmmm… you changed something, I am hearing much more bass, more dynamic slam and less sizzle on top." Well then. Me, somewhat stumped as I was scratching my head trying to think of... Read More »

For the first time ever, I present my reviewer's high-end balance sheet. ROI (Return on Investment in High-end Audio) Grado Epoch Cartridge: $12,000 "State of the Art" Grado Aeon Cartridge: $6000 "85% Overall Performance of Epoch" Savings selecting Aeon over Epoch: "$6000" Aeon Gains: acquire up to 200 re-issue LPs from your favorite vendor Aeon... Read More »

At the last Diana Krall live concert I attended, I happen to be seated next to an elderly woman who took great pleasure in singing, with all abandon, along with Ms. Krall for most of the concert. What made it worse was that she seemed to be quite tone deaf and sang totally out of... Read More »

"Get your station at the touch of a finger!" shouts the vintage ad for General Electric radios. "Touch tuning - Does away with tedious dialing!"  Now, that's an innovation one can hang a fine felt Cavanaugh fedora on. True, the pushbutton worked better in a VW bug than in the home, but you get the... Read More »

Cables, cables everywhere. Thin, thick, round, flat, flexible, stiff, heavy, light, silver, copper, gold, silver plated copper, silver with gold. Just about every possible permutation under the sun. That brings us to Audience's latest Au24 SX interconnect and speaker cables. Audience's newest top-of-the-line cables are a rare and endangered breed falling into the thin, light... Read More »

I described the noble first attempt by Unique Innovation Technology (UIT) to bring their outstanding new technology, demonstrated by their groundbreaking interconnects, to full bore with their speaker cables. I am truly excited by their progress and underscore UIT’s explanation of their current superb results as follows: "Perfect Music Purifier technology within the Perfect Music Purifier... Read More »

Founded in 2013, Alta Audio is the creation of long-time industry presence Michael Levy. Alta's first speaker, the Celesta FRM-2, came about as a result of encouragement from his good friend and client, reviewer Martin Appel. With the support from those he respected, Michael was convinced he could develop a great line of speakers that... Read More »

I get emails from audio enthusiasts and music lovers around the world asking for recommendations of a relatively affordable phonograph cartridge that is warm, dimensional, musical, and has relatively high output so you don't have to use an expensive step-up transformer with it to play music. I have found that particular combination of traits in... Read More »

Late last year, I had a tremendous review opportunity that focused on ProJect's The Classic turntable; unbeknownst to me, the review unit arrived as the heavily upgraded Superpack SB edition. Which, along with electronic speed control and other really nice goodies thrown in, also came with a Sumiko Blue Point No. 2 cartridge attached to... Read More »

Saturday mornings I'm at the Greenmarket early and later I make my way over to Academy Records, my favorite music retailer. While perusing the bins recently, I stumbled upon Jazz Ballets from Broadway, an early stereo LP from 1958 (Warner Bros BS 1240). The title won't ring a bell for many people, but it was... Read More »

Fergus Henderson—the chef who's the reason the hip restaurant around the corner from you serves bone marrow, sweetbreads, and other animal bits—opens his seminal cookbook Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, with a terse description of lunch at Sweetings. When you order the smoked eel at the bar of this London seafood... Read More »

As I began listening to the Gingko ARCHs the many audio tweaks I've tried over the years ran through my mind. The more I thought about it virtually every system I've heard, no matter price or size, included some sort of accessory I would—at least loosely—label as a tweak, an accessory that can improve the... Read More »

German loudspeaker manufacturer Audio Physic has a long and storied history of innovation. From the employment of side-mounted woofers and narrow baffles featured throughout its loudspeaker lines, to coaxial, string-suspended midrange / tweeter drivers utilized in the legacy Kronos and Caldera II models, and even to the promotion of radical nearfield-based placement recommendations, Audio Physic... Read More »

I've been using JPLAY as my go-to computer-based music player/streamer for the last couple of years—it's without a doubt the very best bang-for-your-buck improvement for use with any PC music playback system. In my review of the Sonore microRendu last year, I found that music via my PC with JPLAY came darn close to matching... Read More »

I think of Shunyata Research as an investigative research center for signal and power transmission. And I suspect its principal scientist, Caelin Gabriel, has a lot of fun digging into how electricity works, down to the quantum level. After all, Gabriel spent his early career with the NSA, designing military systems to acquire extremely low-level... Read More »

I told a knowledgeable audio friend that I was writing about Q Acoustics speakers, and he didn't know the brand, so he looked it up. He saw online that the 3050 floorstanders I was to review cost $700. "This is bargain-basement stuff," he said. "Why is Positive Feedback getting you to review them?" Why do... Read More »

I wonder if Geoff Merrigan, the owner and designer of the British company TELLURIUM Q is having nightmares? The question seems to me to be all the more justified, since both him and his company have roots in the pro world, that is, one set on functionality and utilitarianism and reluctant to any experiments. The experiments... Read More »

At the last Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, a conversation took place between Chris Morris of Bluebird Music (Spendor's North American distributor, based in Canada) and PF's Dave Clark regarding Spendor's newest and most affordable line of loudspeakers. The A2 and A4 Models, priced at $2395 and $3195 USD, would offer Spendor's renowned sound at a... Read More »