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Digital Streaming is a relatively new sound source for me. Call me old fashioned, curmudgeonly, resistant or even a snob, but I have been seriously engrossed in vinyl and transferring a bunch of it to reel to reel for over a year, so my streaming endeavors have been at a minimum comparatively speaking. I certainly... Read More »

The last 2 years of computer audio (2017 – 2019) for listeners and musicians have been unlike anything I have seen or heard since the earliest exciting and revolutionary days of the introduction of DSD as SACDs into the market which I participated with as an album (SACD The Window released in 2003). After the... Read More »

"Is it live or is it Memorex?" If you're old enough to remember that ad for audio cassettes (hell, if you're old enough to remember audio cassettes) you also remember that nobody had trouble answering the question. I don't care how astounding your Nakamichi Dragon cassette player happened to be, nobody ever walked into your... Read More »

Review By Dave Hanson With this article, Positive Feedback continues its content-sharing relationship with Enjoy the Music. Dave Hanson shares his thoughts about the LampizatOr Amber III Hi-Res DAC. Read, and learn.... Dr. David W. Robinson, Editor-in-Chief World Premiere Review! Fall in love with your music all over again. It's one thing to create a component that listeners can... Read More »

The Unbearable Joy of Thinking Outside the Box Now that GTT Audio & Video head Bill Parish and I are finally back on friendly terms (heck, he even calls me on the phone occasionally to give me a hard time, and to ask when I plan on finishing the reviews I promised to write, if... Read More »

Pure Audio are a Taiwanese audio company with years of audio design experience under their belt. Despite not being famous amongst audio circles, the brand have attempted to break into international waters with their first successful distributor, Underwood HiFi, residing in the U.S.  Part of their mission to win customers on a global scale has... Read More »

This guest article is by Thom Mackris, head honcho at Galibier Design. PF Senior Associate Editor Lynn Olson shared it with me right after Thom published his comments on a very recent three-hour listening session that he had with Lynn. They were doing some listening comparisons with exaSound DACs; the comments below summarize Thom's take on... Read More »

We're Gonna Spread Our Wings And Take To The Sky For some time now I've been attempting to implement, to my satisfaction, a home built music server/home theater PC. Being an audiophile, I set the bar higher for sound than picture. But until just recently my attempts have not produced sound quality competitive with my... Read More »

Self-portrait, 2017 In medias res… From time to time, I shake out my ongoing audio journal, and comment on some products and items that have accumulated over the past few months. Nothing too lengthy or intense, but quick thoughts and bullet points indicative of fine audio designs/products that I think our readers should be aware... Read More »

Audio is all about good times. At least, it should be. Yes, I'm like everyone else in this silly hobby, poring over the mysteries of phono cable capacitance or trying to squeeze gear the size of a Mennonite hope chest into a room too small for much hope to fit. Still, at the risk of... Read More »

This note reflects, essentially, my first toe in the water of a higher end headphone setup, at least as a reviewer. I've heard high end speaker systems for decades. My first "high end" headphone setup was sometime in the late 1970s, an unknown model of magical Stax "earspeakers." At the time I thought them better... Read More »

Headed by two industry veterans, Schiit Audio is a company that has taken the world of high-end personal audio by storm with their focus on value and commitment to developing game-stopping products.  The original Yggdrasil represented Schiit's flagship DAC product, and garnered the company a loyal following. Now, the company have further modified the internals... Read More »

Digital Audio Converters (DAC), which take the carefully crafted digital signal and convert it to analog, mostly matured between five and ten years ago. Companies like DCS, Playback Designs, Theta, and more, pushed the chip manufacturers to develop extraordinarily complex and powerful designs, and finally have nearly eliminated jitter and other innate problems. Musicality improved... Read More »

It Even Makes Julienne Fries It was a golden age for Television, or perhaps commercials in the 1960s. The Ronco Veg-O-Matic hit the market, promising  to ease the life homemakers everywhere. This food slicer did it all; its catch-phrase, "It slices! It dices! It even makes julienne fries!" became the go-to reference for multi-function devices... Read More »

I was recently introduced to Mytek, a company out of Brooklyn, NY that specializes in digital electronics. Not being known for being the go-to guy for digital I thought the opportunity to try something completely different was something I could not pass up. Suffice it to say right up front that I am glad that... Read More »

A little over three years ago, I reviewed the original PS Audio Sprout integrated amplifier (HERE). That unit received widespread acclaim throughout the audio press for its feature set, performance and price. However, those who paid attention to my review would recognize that though I respected it for its effort and its potential significance in... Read More »

This article, as reviewed by Francisco Duran, Dave Clark, Larry Fisher, and Larry Cox, originally ran in audioMusings' Issue 12, 2000 and then in Issue 1, June/July 2002 of Positive Feedback To say that the 47 Labs CD combo is unconventional in its design and looks is an understatement. The Model 4713 Flatfish player/transport is a... Read More »

On December 11, 2018, PS Audio announced download availability of the newest Operating System for the PS Audio DirectStream Junior DAC. Named after another of Colorado's 14,000 foot peaks, Snowmass, this update to PSA's DirectStream digital converters is likely to be judged a significant step up in sound quality. Handwritten for the DirectStream Junior's Field-Programmable Gate Array... Read More »

I remember my first high-end digital player, a California Audio Labs DX-1. Looking forward to perfect sound forever, I tried to sell myself on the virtues of that CD player. Listening through my (then) Martin Logan Aerius speakers and Classe amp, I could never shake the feeling that the DX-1's sonic signature was contributing to... Read More »