John Atkinson

Surfing the Usenet newsgroups and the Web audio forums recently, it struck me that the old wisdom is correct: If you keep your mouth shut, you won't say anything with which anyone can disagree. A topic that seems to be of perennial interest is how Stereophile chooses the products it reviews. Yet the more I have explained how it's done, the greater the criticism that is heaped on the magazine.

Gary Koh was showing off his new Genesis Advanced Technologies 2.2 junior speaker ($80.000/pair) with a superbly natural-sounding track from Canadian chanteuse Anne Bisson. The 2.2jr combines a 48"-high midrange ribbon with 12 of the 1" circular-ribbon tweeters used in other Genesis designs and two servo-controlled 12" aluminum-cone woofers, these driven by their own 1kW amplifier. The rest of the system included Viola amplification and a Burmester phono preamplifier.

You could sense the frustration in Keith Pray's e-mail. "We are on the same team. I have always respected your wishes and will continue to do so," he had written me. At the request of a possible advertiser, Stereophile's publisher had asked me a question about something appearing in the issue of Stereophile we were preparing. I had responded that not only would I not give him an answer, I felt it inappropriate for him to ask.

I’ve had a couple of conversations the past couple of years with mastering engineer Dave Collins about the D/A processor he was designing for Manley Labs, the company run by his wife EveAnna Manley. The 2014 CES saw the consumer debut of the Heart Monitor Controller 24/192 DSP ΔΣ [Delta-Sigma] DAC, which was being demmed in a system featuring Manley’s 25th Anniversary monoblocks, which use KT120 tubes. There are four digital inputs and Dave has kept the fully differential signal path as short as possible. Silicon includes a SHARC DSP and AD1955 DAC chips and harmonic distortion has been kept to a superbly low –120dB, and even that is the subjectively benign second. Price has yet to be decided.