Jason Victor Serinus

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More Mellowness from Colleen and Albert
AXPONA 2013
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Mar 15, 2013  |  0 comments
In the second room sponsored by Arnold Martinez' newly opened Tweak Studio (located in Chicago's Hyatt Downtown) and Colleen Cardas Imports, a SOTA turntable, curiously unidentified on the room's equipment list, and unidentified cartridge and tonearm, were making lovely sound with three products from PureAudio. Designed by Ross Stevens and Gary Morrison, formerly of Plinius, the redundantly titled PureAudio dual-mono vinyl phono preamplifier ($4500) joined PureAudio's dual-mono Control preamplifier ($9500) and Reference 65Wpc class-A monoblock amplifiers ($15,500) to drive My Audio Design 1920S loudspeakers ($3800/pair).
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More on Jason's RMAF Day 2
RMAF 2018
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Oct 10, 2018  |  40 comments
I almost missed the huge EMM Labs exhibit on the ground floor until John Atkinson told me that he had visited it, and the sound was exceptional. Don't quote me on the adjective, please. Instead, I'll own it for myself. When a system makes a recording of a 9' concert grand—in this case, Murray Perahia's instrument—sounds like it really is a 9' grand, color me very, very impressed. As one should be, given a system price tag of near $1,000,000.
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More on MusicGiants
News
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jun 21, 2009  |  0 comments
On June 2, Stereophile reported that HDGiants.com, formerly known as MusicGiants.com, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The future of the high-quality music and video download site that had most recently begun offering "Super HD" 24-bit surround-sound downloads was unclear.
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More Revelations on Jason's Day One
RMAF 2017
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Oct 11, 2017  |  2 comments
When unquestionably fine components were given sufficient room to strut their stuff, as happened when the new Wilson Audio Alexia Series 2 loudspeaker was mated with Constellation Audio electronics, the results were often magical.
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More than a Black Box
CES 2008
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 09, 2008  |  First Published: Jan 10, 2008  |  10 comments
Instead of using conventional CD playback technology, the Rockport room featured the DC-powered Black Box Audiophile PC from Blue Smoke Entertainment Systems of Chicago. (Preliminary pricing, expected to lower before the unit reaches the market, is $7999.) With no moving parts in the box into which one inserts a CD, the DSP-based system reclocks the data after reading the CD, basically eliminating jitter. It copies the audio data from a CD onto a hard drive, reading the CD multiple times if necessary to eliminate data-reading errors. It is said to be far more accurate my own conventional stick it in the iMac and burn it in iTunes setup. The unit can process data up to 24/192. Lordie did it sound good.
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More to See on RMAF Day 3
RMAF 2018
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Oct 11, 2018  |  9 comments
Here's a switch: Instead of a million-dollar system, we begin with a bargain-priced powered-speaker system, the Vanatoo Transparent One Encore ($599/pair). Designed near me, in Seattle, and manufactured in China, this successor to Vanatoo's original model, which was released six years ago, has a new 1" aluminum dome tweeter, more powerful 100W, four-channel amplifier with "much better" DSP-based L/R crossover, remote control, Bluetooth with aptX, and four more "automatically sensed" inputs for analog, USB, Toslink optical, and coaxial digital, the last three accepting up to 24/96 but downsampling to 24/48.
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Movin' on Up at Munich
Munich 2016
Jason Victor Serinus  |  May 12, 2016  |  16 comments
I never cover shows with the intention of citing "Best Of"…
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Moving on Up at AXPONA
AXPONA 2016
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Apr 19, 2016  |  3 comments
From left to right: Larry Marcus president of Paragon Sight Sound, Nick Doshi of Doshi Audio, Dave Wilson, Peter McGrath, John R. Quick, dCS America, Jon Zimmer of Transparent Audio.

At an after-hours press listening session sponsored by Paragon Audio/Video of Michigan, Dave Wilson was in a major upbeat mood for the show premiere of Wilson Audio's new Alexx loudspeaker ($109,000/pair). . . The Alexx, Wilson's successor to the MAXX 3, acquitted itself admirably through the Doshi Audio 3.0 line stage, 3.0 phono stage, and 3.0 tape stage ($16,999/each), as well as their Jhor mono amplifiers ($29,995/pair); dCS Vivaldi digital system ($115,000 total); Transparent Opus cabling and power conditioning ($208,360 total) along with an extra-long version of John Marks' Esperanto Audio Small-Batch S/PDIF cable on Peter McGrath's Sound devices portable digital.

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MQA Advances and More Encountered at CES
CES 2019
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jan 13, 2019  |  34 comments
Besides the appearance there of many new components capable of MQA decoding and rendering, CES provided an opportunity to unveil two important MQA developments…
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MQA at LAAS
LAAS 2017MQA
John Atkinson, Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jun 11, 2017  |  28 comments
MQA's Bob Stuart comparing PCM and MQA recordings in the Sunny Components room

Despite there now having been many opportunities for audiophiles to compare MQA-encoded recordings with the PCM originals—as well as comparisons at shows and dealer events, the Norwegian 2L record label has offered downloads of MQA/PCM files for quite a long time—there are still members of the press who insist that no-one, other than some reviewers, has been able to perform such comparisons. At the 2017 LAAS, not only were some exhibitors demonstrating MQA—Aurender, Meridian—Covina, CA retailer Sunny Components devoted the show's Saturday afternoon to specific comparisons hosted by MQA's Bob Stuart and Wilson Audio's Peter McGrath.

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