John Atkinson

John Atkinson on the Recording
"This will fix it!" Kimber Kable's Ray Kimber placed some acoustic baffles around the table on which sat my Apple TiBook. We were recording Robert Silverman performing one of Beethoven's masterworks for piano, the Diabelli Variations, Op.120, and I had been bothered by a faint whistle underlying the music. It turned out to be the sound of my laptop's fan, an unforeseen drawback of my decision to dispense with tape and record straight to hard drive for the August 2004 sessions. We had already had a problem with a slight slapback echo from the balcony of the Austad Auditorium at Weber State University in Utah, which Ray had fixed with drapes, and a problem with low-frequency rumble from airplanes overflying the college campus during one session had been solved by Ray phoning the air traffic control tower. However, even Ray couldn't deal with thunder, so that was the one session we decided to finish early.

In his bimonthly column, "The Fifth Element," John Marks has tried to identify pro-audio components that would be of interest to audiophiles. In his June 2005 episode, John wrote about Grace Design's m902 D/A headphone amplifier ($1695), the Colorado company's replacement for the 901, which had long been a favorite of his. Changes include: the handling of single-wire sample rates of up to 192kHz; unbalanced analog outputs, controlled by the front volume control, to allow the unit to be used as a preamplifier; a cross-feed processing circuit licensed from www.meier-audio.de; power-supply revisions; and the provision of a USB digital input, in addition to S/PDIF, AES/EBU, and TosLink.

There are components that stick in a reviewer's memory long after they have been crated up and entrusted to the tender mercies of UPS. When I reviewed the Verona Master Clock from English company dCS in March 2005, the sound it allowed the combination of a dCS Verdi transport, Purcell upsampler, and Elgar Plus D/A processor to achieve from SACD was the best I had heard from my system—better, even, than I remember getting from the EMM Labs SACD transport and processor I had borrowed for a weekend a few months earlier. But at what price? The stack of four dCS components adds up to a cool $45k—"Yes, the complete dCS system is hip," I wrote in the conclusion to my review. "But $45k's worth of hip? That's a question I can't answer, I'm afraid, what with school fees and mortgages and taxes." The megabux dCS stack thus had to go back to the distributor at the end of the review period.

Michael Fremer has a problem.