March 1, 2017 - AXPONA (Audio Expo North America), the largest consumer audio show in the United States, returns to the Westin O'Hare Rosemont April 21-23, with nearly 45 new manufacturers and dealers making their debut at the 2017 show, offering music lovers and audiophiles the very latest products in the industry. AXPONA is known for featuring world-renowned... Read More »
Strap yourself in your seat, because we are going to go on a VIP ride with the VPI Avenger turntable. And yes, you dear readers are the VIPs in this adventure. This is part 1 of a 3 part series. The reason for the three parts is that I am going to review all three... Read More »
Roger Skoff writes about audio's bottom line - bass and Hi-Fi. When I was twelve years old, I had never heard bass. Really. Oh, I thought I had, but when you actually think about it, my guess is that not only will you understand and agree with what I just said; you may even discover... Read More »
Power to the people! The quality of AC power has a huge effect on the performance of an audio system! Most of you already know this. Some of you have gone to the expense of having a dedicated AC line installed for your audio system. We've been experimenting with AC power a lot lately. We... Read More »
The KRONOS Pro LE Turntable with Black Beauty Tonearm, photograph courtesy of KRONOS Audio. Take a breath. A shift of gear, now. From reference-grade DSD DACs to reference-grade turntables. This will be the third of three turntable evaluations that I've done over the past year, rounding out what's turned out to be the top three... Read More »
So I've been playing around more with headphones (headphones from Sennheiser, Audeze, AKG, and OPPO are in my usual rotation of references), but after hearing the new ELEARs from Focal… uh, we got to have these. At an event held over in Torrance at The Source A/V a while ago, Carol and I, along with a throng... Read More »
USB Cables… my last Rambling's column centered on the Purist Audio Luminist Revision Neptune cables and how, well either differences in cables are there for you or not. For whatever reason applies here—you hear it, you don't hear it, you can't hear it, or won't hear it… really doesn't matter as everyone finds their happy... Read More »
Tinariwen, Elwan (ANTI- 87467-1, 2-LP set $19.98 through Amazon) Reviewing contemporary music is often merely a matter of describing a hybrid. "Their music is a cross between Gwar and the first three Partridge Family LPs." "This latest album blends grindcore and dubstep with Texas swing." You can communicate the essence of a performer by mentioning two... Read More »
February 14, 2017 Channel Islands Audio is proud to announce the release of our long-awaited PEQ1 MKII MM/MC Phono Preamplifier The PEQ1 is a versatile design offering outstanding performance with a wide variety of phono cartridge types. This new dual-mono design is aimed at music lovers seeking the utmost life-like performance from their vinyl collection.... Read More »
This is an ongoing project by Claude Lemaire of Soundevaluations. Here is the second 10 of his Top 500 SuperSonic List... 11. Carole King,Tapestry. Ode Records. SP 77009 (1971), MoFi, MFSL 1-414 (2013), 33 1/3 rpm. Genre: pop, soft rock, acoustic folk, jazzy overtones Throughout the 1960s Carole King and song-writing partner Gerry Goffin wrote a ton of hits... Read More »
Our audio compadre John Marks herein rightly brings to our attention Abraham Lincoln's deep affection for opera and the stage. He was assassinated, after all, at Ford's Theater in April of 1865, much to the grief and anger of the narrow-minded pietists and pharisees of his generation. Lincoln considered the theater and opera to be... Read More »
Boulder, CO: 2/13/2017: PS Audio is proud to introduce the Stellar line of components, continuing our four decade tradition of ultra-high-value, high performance products. Stellar will initially consist of three models: Stellar Gain Cell DAC combines an updated version of our analog Gain Cell technology with a full-featured DAC that can play the DSD output from our new DirectStream Memory Player. MSRP $1,699 in the... Read More »
Eclipse: Chamber Music of Mischa Zupko. Wendy Warner, cello. Sang Me Lee, violin. Mischa Zupko, piano. Cedille CDR 90000168. Calling someone a "Chicago composer" as Cedille Records often does is probably not doing him a favor. It suggests limitations, local heroes. The fact is, in the case of Mischa Zupko (and cellist Wendy Warner who... Read More »
"Man, it was easy! Five acres of solar panels, and I killed it!!"
John Marks' final installment about his recommended Steinway and Sons office system is below. He focuses on the Grace Design m920 DAC as the digital heart of the system. Read on for his summary. And remember that John's blog site, The Tannhauser Gate (http://www.thetannhausergate.com) is a fine place for audio commentary and music/video reviews! Recommended. Dr. David... Read More »
In part three of this series, John Marks introduces cables to his small office audio system recommendations. While John has his own Esperanto Audio line of reference audio cables, he concentrates on Audioquest's very good price-t0-performance cables. This is shaping up to be a very pleasant office/desktop system; I appreciate the useful advice contained in... Read More »
Parasound's Zamp v.3 stereo amplifier One of my favorite lines from the original Star Trek TV series (and please, nobody forget that Alexander Courage's theme music borrowed heavily from Mahler's symphonies 1 and 7) was something like: I bet five Quatloos on the feisty newcomer! Well, Parasound's Zamp v.3 is hardly a newcomer, but, it's... Read More »
The Gryphon Audio Kalliope DSD DAC upon arrival here… (Photograph and image processing by Robinson) The world of DSD DACs has certainly exploded over the past four years, going from a relative "we happy few" to over 400 models to choose from. The price points vary wildly…from $189 all the way out to multiple tens... Read More »
Flemming Rasmussen of Gryphon Audio Gryphon was never the adopter of technology for the sake of technology on its own, we always found it intriguing and followed it closely, but our experiments remained in the lab for the right timing. Right timing? Gryphon made it first appearance 30 years ago with a revolutionary HEADAMP, taking... Read More »
New proprietary design brings together premium materials and precisely tuned enclosures to achieve best-in-class performance Periodic Audio, an audio products manufacturer specializing in high-performance portable audio solutions, will launch its first three models of in-ear monitors (IEM) at CanJam NYC 2017, February 4-5. These IEMs have been engineered using materials and processes common to... Read More »
John Marks gives us a recommendation for a stereo system that offers a great deal of musical satisfaction with a small footprint and at a more reasonable price point. This four-part series will explore his thoughts on this package. May it serve you well! Dr. David W. Robinson, Ye Olde Editor Photo of Eric Feidner... Read More »
Maria Schneider (photograph courtesy of Soka University) Maria Schneider is an unrivaled American composer in the grand tradition of Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin and Ellington, a transcendent lineage that defines western musical maturity. A once undiscovered orchid, Maria's risen to a plateau of melodic delight and aesthetic delicacy without equal, an achievement accrued in... Read More »
Merging High Performance Audio and Versatile Connectivity OPPO Digital today announced that the new Sonica DAC is ready for release. The newest entry into the OPPO family of digital audio products, Sonica DAC merges audiophile-grade performance with the latest network streaming technology. With more and more music coming from digital sources, the DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter)... Read More »
Back in the '80s, when I was in college, I tried very hard to get into jazz. Many of my music-loving friends had already discovered it, and they constantly told me that if I found the right entry point I would totally dig it. I tried and I tried but I just couldn't find the... Read More »
Finishing graduate study at Stanford, 1970-72, I was Director of Admissions at the The Athenian School, a small and innovative prep school on Mt. Diablo in the Bay Area. It was funded by the Ford Foundation as a tribute to Dyke Brown, its longtime Vice President, a going away present supporting educational objectives he'd championed... Read More »
Cables, cables, cables. What are we supposed to do? Yeah, there are those who feel that regardless of what one hears, they can't be hearing what they are hearing, because, well you can't hear that as cables done correctly do nothing... to the sound. That is, cables cannot make a difference as long as they... Read More »
Acoustic Revive RPC-1 Power Supply Conditioner The intrigue usually starts with a message from Yoshi-san or Elia-san from the MuSon Project in Osaka, Japan, who export Japanese audio exotica to The World. Every time I get a message from Messrs. Hontani I get pretty excited, because long experience has taught me that with their extremely... Read More »
The Audio Guild (TAG) and the Electro Magnetic Amplifier Co. (EMAC) announce a new headphone amplifier/line preamplifier designed for the most demanding audiophiles. Designed to capture the magic of the classic single-ended triode (SET) vacuum tube amplifier but without the heat, expense and regular replacement of vacuum tubes, the EMAC 535SE uses a unique and... Read More »
Remasters 2016 vol. 1 | vol. 3 | vol. 4 | vol. 24 | vol. 54 | vol. 63 COMPACT DISC | LONG PLAY Warner Music Poland sp. z o.o. Wytwórnia Polskie Nagrania [email protected] polskienagrania.com.pl warnermusic.pl The third meeting of High Fidelity readers with Polish Jazz Remasters (the so-called second "six", as the record label decided to launch... Read More »
LA Audio Show NY PR Firm THERE'S A NEW SHOWMAN IN TOWN LA Audio Show Names NY PR Firm; Goes After New Market LA Audio Show NY PR Firm The Orion Group, operator of The LA Audio Show; with its debut event scheduled for the Sheraton Gateway in Los Angeles, June 2-4, 2017; has retained... Read More »
The National's sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, continues the Brooklyn-based band's streak of melancholy mellow, indie rock. It's reminiscent of the rhythms and monotone vocals of Joy Division and with the suffer-in-silence-like lyrics of The Smiths. "Don't Swallow The Cap" and "Graceless" are dead ringers for Joy Division songs. Singer Matt Berninger and band... Read More »
HiFiMAN Headphones - HE1000 V2 and Edition X V2 Within past several years the world of high-end audio took a course leading it towards the "wall". What wall? A complete price stratosphere. Sure, quality has to cost, and for an exceptional quality one pays double or even triple. Despite this, the current prices for the... Read More »
Greetings from the underground, fellow music lovers and seekers after audio nirvana. As I may have conveyed in my last ruminations many, many moons ago, I am luxuriating in the aural glow of an extended series of incremental tweaks, which coming as they have, in drips and drabs, have brought me to the point where... Read More »
This is an ongoing project by Claude Lemaire of Soundevaluations. Here is the first 10 of his Top 500 SuperSonic List... "This is a journey into sound. A journey which along the way will bring to you new colour, new dimension, new value..." What better way to introduce this new long term project than to quote Geoffrey... Read More »
The NAS element of my Roon/QNAP/microRendu setup is a QNAP TS-251, which has the requisite 64-bit processor and sufficiently upgradeable RAM to run Roon Core effectively. And at a significant cost savings when compared to Roon's recommended QNAP setup ($500 vs. nearly $2000 USD). During my initial explorations of Roon late last year, I quickly... Read More »
Positive Feedback has a lively and diverse creative community on its masthead. One very unforgettable person, and a very close, dear friend of mine, is the inimitable Dr. Jim Merod, a Senior Associate Editor at PF. A professor at Soka University in southern California, Jim is widely renowned in the world of Jazz as The... Read More »
Part 2 of John Marks' Christmas recommendations: This time, the hardware. Like the wise men's gifts, in a set of three. Simple. Affordable. And each clearly excellent at its price point. Very helpful, friend John! Dr. David W. Robinson, Ye Olde Editor Part 1 covered recorded media (CD boxed sets, and an SACD/CD hybrid). Part... Read More »
