This weather is pointless. Pointless! What's the use of all this snow and ice? Don't tell me it looks pretty. I'm just not fit for this sort of cold. It's days like today after windy winter nights like last, when the temperatures plunge into the single digits and my apartment's old pipes freeze, that I wish I had an entire fleet of fiery amps to keep me warm.
Once you've been identified by your family and friends as an audiophile, they might try to give you gifts to support your habit. What would be the <I>worst</I> audiophile gift you could imagine?
I had a wonderful chuckle while reading the reviews of the Finial Laser Turntable in the May 1990 issue of <I>HFN/RR</I>. Perhaps I should preface this by saying that, in the entire quarter-century since I became intensely involved in audio, I have always found the LP an unsatisfactory playback medium for music. As a regular concert-goer in Boston and an addict of WGBH-FM's simply miked, virtually unprocessed live broadcasts of BSO concerts direct from Symphony Hall, I never learned to ignore the many anti-musical distortions endemic to LPs—the ticks and pops, the inner-groove congestion and tracing distortion, the harsh mistracking of high-level climaxes and overcut grooves, the persistent static in dry winter air, the constant slight wow due to off-center spindle holes, the muddy bass due to resonances and feedback, the universal cutting engineer's practice of blending low bass into mono (which wipes out low-frequency hall ambience).
The whole field of subjective audio reviewing—listening to a piece of equipment to determine its characteristics and worth—is predicated on the idea that human perception is not only far more sensitive than measurement devices, but far more <I>important</I> than the numbers generated by "objective" testing. Subjective evaluation of audio equipment, however, is often dismissed as meaningless by the scientific audio community. A frequent objection is the lack of thousands upon thousands of rigidly controlled clinical trials. Consequently, conclusions reached by subjective means are considered unreliable because of the anecdotal nature of listening impressions. The scientific audio community demands rigorous, controlled, blind testing with many trials before any conclusions can be drawn. Furthermore, any claimed abilities to discriminate sonically that are not provable under blind testing conditions are considered products of the listeners' imaginations. Audible differences are said to be real only if their existence can be proved by such "scientific" procedures (footnote 1).
ASL Group (formerly known as Audiophile Systems Ltd.) announced December 19 that it had acquired Naim North America, the US distributor of Naim Audio and NaimNet, a deal that strengthens both ASL and Naim NA. Naim Audio's CEO Paul Stephenson said, "It's like going home, since we originally were distributed by Audiophile Systems when we first moved into the US."
"How do you make an object common as a box iconic?" asked Bob Graffy, Snell's vice president/brand manager. He and Joseph D'Appolito, Snell's chief design engineer, were sitting in my listening room, discussing cabinet designs. Graffy noted that KEF had sought the same in their distinctive, silvery, cylindrical Muon loudspeaker ($150,000/pair). For the flagship model in their Illusion series, Snell commissioned Gerd Schmieta, former designer for Ideo, to integrate D'Appolito's wish list for an ideal enclosure: a narrow, rounded upper baffle for the midrange and tweeter, wider at the base for the woofers, holding a constant cross-sectional area while maximizing cabinet volume, and compliance with a 15° tip test.
Fearless leader called me and asked if I'd be interested in reviewing the Simaudio Moon i-1 ($1500), the entry-level integrated amplifier in Simaudio's Classic line. Hmmm. I'd been very impressed by all of the more expensive Simaudio products I'd heard at <I>Stereophile</I>'s Home Entertainment shows over the years, and the 50Wpc Moon i-1 would be an interesting match for the affordable speakers I've had in-house lately. Send it on, JA!
Italian manufacturer Chario Loudspeakers has never had a strong presence in the US. No wonder, then, when confronted by these exquisitely finished beauties of solid hardwood, many American audiophiles think, "Sonus Faber rip-off." Without knowing the musical history of the 1960s, had you heard Badfinger first, you might have thought the same thing when you then heard the Beatles. Similarly, Chario, by far Italy's largest maker of high-performance speakers, was founded in 1975, eight years <I>before</I> Sonus Faber. While SF has its drive-units built to its own specifications by other firms, Chario designs and builds its own.
The Gini Systems "LS3/5a" is an unlicensed and inexact replica of the celebrated LS3/5a outside (remote location) broadcast monitoring loudspeaker originally developed by the BBC in the early 1970s. (For a précis of the LS3/5a's history, click <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/690">here</A>.)
Dear colleagues:<br>
The year is almost over. The air has grown cold. Our rivers are stuck in deep, deep thought. Outside my 6th-floor window, countless, swirling bits of snow are decorating this gray city like little answers blowing in the wind, like so many true loves: A sure sign that the annual <a href="http://www.cesweb.org/">Consumer Electronics Show</a> in glittery Las Vegas is right around the bend. It opens on Thursday, January 8th and runs right on through Sunday, the 11th.