LATEST ADDITIONS

I want to talk about the acoustics of live music and recordings. As I write this I'm back in Boston for a week, re-calibrating my ears with (excuse the expression) the "absolute sound" of live music in various concert halls. On Friday the Boston Symphony played symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich, producing (as always) magnificent sound with the aid of Symphony Hall's near-legendary acoustics.

I felt like I'd just been offered a choice of 31 flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream topped with up to 57 varieties of Heinz ketchup, 57 condiments, and 47 brands of coddled cream. My head began to spin, my stomach churned, and my mouth grew very dry as I read that Gold Note's DS-10 ($2995) was a "chameleon DAC" with 192 setup options that enable it to "completely blend in with different music genres, giving the listener the opportunity to adapt the behavior of the unit to the music playing, to one's stereo system and, most of all, to the listener's taste."

In contrast to phono cartridges and analog tape recorders, digital audio converters distinguish themselves by the fact that they can be fashioned in an almost infinite number of ways. Therefore, the odds against two manufacturers' DACs or ADCs sounding exactly the same are extremely large.

Some contentious issues will not be resolved in my lifetime: vinyl vs digital, tubes vs solid state, subjective vs objective, streaming vs physical media.

Also, subwoofers vs no subwoofers in a stereo music system.

Hi-fi system resolution has long been the cause of heated arguments. But when it comes to converting digital data to an analog signal, there can be no argument. Data go in at one end of a DAC and an analog signal comes out of the other end, with a noise floor directly rated to the combination of the converter's digital and analog resolution. Ever since I started measuring digital products for Stereophile, I have been expressing a D/A processor's effective resolution in terms of the equivalent number of bits.

I am proud of the fact that my first review for Stereophile was of a modestly priced integrated amplifier called the Rogue Audio Sphinx. Specified at 100Wpc into 8 ohms, 200Wpc into 4 ohms (footnote 1), it played the KEF LS50s like it was made for them. It was simple and handsome and cost only $1295, phono stage included.

For the first time in the two years I've been living in this apartment building, I've received a noise complaint from a neighbor. Coincidence?

As it happened, yes it was a coincidence. True, my music was pretty loud, and the bass from the Piega Premium Wireless 701 loudspeaker system ($7495/pair) was anything but reticent, especially considering the tower's sleek appearance. But I was not the source of the specific noise that caused the complaint. That was the sloppy bass from another neighbor's inferior sound system. (The bass from this Piega system isn't sloppy.)