How much bass is enough?
Reader T. Bloom asks: "Do you tend towards bass frequency-response accuracy, or would you prefer either a little more or a little less bass than measures flat in your listening room?" In other words, how much bass is enough?
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Grails: Doomsdayer's Holiday
It's Friday evening. I would like to be at home, sitting on the orange couch, a beer in my hand, the light rain tapping against my windows, listening to Grails' <i>Doomsdayer's Holiday</i>. Sounds bleak, doesn't it? But Grails are really kind of perfect for this sort of warm, rainy autumn night, with their dark mix of Eastern psychedelia, folk, metal, and free-jazz ramblings. Beautifully recorded, too, with heart-jolting impact and sweet, sweet dynamic range.
The Sound Experience
Thursday, December 4: <i><b>The Sound Experience</i></b> (233 South Federal Highway, Boca Raton, FL) will celebrate their official grand opening with a listening party. Michael Fremer is the guest of honor and will give an analog clinic. RSVP: (561) 391-7868. For more info, visit <a href="http://www.thesndexp.com/">The Sound Experience</a>.
The Romantic Bundle
It is November 14th, and it's hot as heck outside. I wonder how many polar bears just died. That's not funny. The arctic is vanishing, the oceans are rising, we have brown clouds in the sky. Awesome. We are doomed. Screw it. Let's buy some vinyl!
92.6% New Stock
<i>Jimmy Boyd's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." Columbia, 10" (MJV 152).</i>
Listening #71
Here's how God makes audiophiles: He starts with several million blank brain cells, then programs each one, individually, to function as either a love for one single aspect of music reproduction or a hatred for another. There are over a thousand such cells—far too many to list here—but theologians and audio reviewers have worked together to compile this list of the Top 20, which, just like real life, contains a little more love than hate:
Naxos: From 320kbps to Lossless to Blu-ray
Naxos has taken a major step toward distributing higher-quality downloads of classical-music recordings. <A HREF="http://www.classicsonline.com">ClassicsOnline</A>, the label's impressive download site, now offers the world's largest collection of classical-music recordings free of digital rights management (DRM). All of the site's nearly 22,000 albums, from more than 100 independent labels, are available at 320kbps.
The Best Album of 2008
The year’s not quite over, but it’s a safe bet that Sonny Rollins’ <I>Road Shows Vol. 1</I> (on his own Doxy label) will be the best jazz album of 2008 and rank among the best of the decade.
DNM 3D Six preamplifier
It isn't enough to say that engineer <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/404listening">Denis N. Morecroft</A> is one of contemporary audio's few visionaries: He's one of a <I>very</I> few mature designers whose passion for doing things a certain way hasn't abandoned him in the least, and whose well-argued convictions seem stronger than ever. Thus, as others cave in to commerce—the tube-amp designer who offers a solid-state product just to help his dealers fill a price niche, the source-component manufacturer who rails against digital audio one day and starts cranking out CD players the next—DNM Design remains the likeliest of all modern companies to stay its course.
Vincent Audio KHV-1pre headphone amplifier/preamplifier
You know me. I'm not perzackly an audio slut, but I <I>am</I> easy. When Audio Advisor's Wayne Schuurman called me to pitch the Vincent KHV-1pre tube-transistor headphone amplifier, he pretty much had me at "tube" and "headphone." But I wasn't familiar with Vincent Audio.