I tried to name a high-end audio product that's been recommended more often than the Rega Planar 3 turntable. I failed.
The closest I could come was Rega's own RB300 tonearm, surely the best-selling perfectionist tonearm of all time. After that came the Rega Planar 2 turntable, a sample of which I owned and loved in the early 1980s. Next on my list was the original Rega Elys, a moving-magnet cartridge that sounded as chunky and direct as it was cheap and magenta.
I've noted the typically spacious, airy sound of Reimyo electronics at previous shows, and at NYAS 2013 the brand followed suit. Playing through a pair of Combak Audio's single-driver Bravo loudspeakers (ca $8000/pair), themselves supported by Combak Dinosaur stands ($4000/pair not including feet, the latter represented by options too numerous to list here), the Reimyo gear did a lovely job with the classic Fritz Reiner/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Scheherazade. (NB: The astonishing trumpeter on that 1960 recording, Bud Herseth, died only days ago.) Reimyo products in use included the CDT-777 CD transport (ca $12,000), the CAT-777 preamp (ca $20,000), and the KAP-777 monoblock amplifiers ($27,000/pair). I was given to understand that Wynn Audio, which sponsored this room, now distributes Reimyo and Combak in the US.
The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real.—Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
The three-way, 220 lb Avior loudspeaker from Rockport Technologies ($29,500/pair) uses the same beryllium tweeter as the company's $225,000 Arrakis, complemented with all-new midrange and bass drivers that are built around Rockport's proprietary carbon-fiber sandwich/composite cones. The Avior sounded truly impressive with a Playback Designs MPS-5 CD/SACD player/DAC ($17,000), Electrocompaniet EC4.8 preamplifier ($5129), BAT VK-655SE amplifier ($14,000), and cabling from Transparent Audio. A representative from the Omaha, Nebraska dealer The Sound Environment demonstrated the system with humor, charm, candor—and good music.
Barring the unlikely resurrection of either the summertime Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago or this magazine’s own fondly remembered movable feasts of the 1990s, there is only one hi-fi event for which I would board an airplane: Welcome to Denver. And while this non-flyer is already considering renting a car and driving home Monday, I’m glad as hell to be here: I think this is going to be fun.
I can imagine the gaiety and mirth that filled the halls of the electronics industry in the 1950s, as engineer after bespectacled engineer realized that the transistor would soon consign to the outposts of oblivion those ancient technologies that had preceded it. Before long—surely no more than a decade—the hated vacuum tube would vanish from the Earth, along with the tube socket, the tube tester, the tag board, the high-voltage rail, and that lowest rascal of them all, the output transformer. What a jubilant time!
It’s okay to like R.E.M. again, and not just because their latest single (“Uberlin”) is the band’s best in over a decade: In the exhibit sponsored by EgglestonWorks and Rogue Audio, R.E.M.’s “How the West Was Won and Where it Got Us” sounded so good and so clear and so utterly fresh that I literally did not, at first, recognize the music. The combination of Rogue Hera II preamplifier ($7995) and Apollo monoblock amplifiers ($10,995/pair) plus Eggleston Andra III loudspeakers (ca $24,000 per pair) contributed to my wondering if the album from which that single sprung—1997’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi—might be better than I thought. I guess I’ll give the LP version another try (although I maintain that NAIHF represented the very nadir of the group’s covert-art pretentiousness). The Axpona experience renewed, in particular, my admiration for Rogue Audio’s persistence in making superb tube electronics at sane, fair prices.
Besides my 20th wedding anniversary and the 15th anniversary of Listener magazine's first issue, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Roksan Audio Ltd., easily one of the most innovative design and manufacturing firms in British audio. Before Roksan came upon the scene in 1985, none of us had ever seen a loudspeaker whose tweeter was isolated from its surroundings by a sprung suspension. Or a commercial phono preamplifier designed to fit inside a turntable, just a centimeter away from the tonearm base. And who among us could have guessed that the Linn LP12's hegemony—among flat-earthers, I mean—would be broken by a turntable from outside of Scotland? Yet the Roksan Darius loudspeaker, Artaxerxes phono stage, and, above all, Xerxes turntable accomplished those things and more, to the genuine surprise of nearly everyone—and to the benefit of our industry at large, as other firms took those ideas and ran with them.
Hop hop hop! Who’s that on top of the DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/96 loudspeaker? It’s Richard the bunny, and he’s come to thank Stephen Mejias for staying behind and getting Stereophile’s June issue off to the printers while JA, RD, and I frittered away the hours in sunny Montreal, eating snails, duck livers, and pig-leg shavings. Richard thoroughly enjoyed the DeVore Orangutans. (More on that later.)
When an exhibitor installs, near to the door, something as exotically beautiful as the Scheu Analog Cantus tonearm ($1560), it takes me longer than ususal to make my way into the rest of the room. So it was in the exhibit of distributor Charisma Audio, whose lovely and accommodating staff more than justified their name. While there I also enjoyed a system comprising a Well-Tempered Amadeus GTA record player ($4325), EMT TSD 15 cartridge ($1999), Audio Exklusiv P 0.2 phono stage ($`1299), the same company’s P 7 preamplifier ($7999), Calyx Audio Femti amplifier ($2099), and Capriccio Continuo (ATD) Admonitor 311 speakers ($5999). The system, which gave the sense of wanting just little more breathing room—it was arranged along the long wall —did a nonetheless convincing job with Cannonball Adderley’s Riverside album Know What I Mean.
Art Dudley
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