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Innuos Unveils Stream3 & Stream1—Modular Server/Streamer Lineup Explained | AXPONA 2025
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LATEST ADDITIONS

Budget Component Reviews Digital Processor Reviews

Cambridge EXN100 streaming D/A processor

Tom Fine
The marriage of little streaming computers to DACs was at first a shotgun thing, a way to add Swiss Army knife capabilities at a price point. That was back when it was cutting-edge to have a NAS server full of digital files on the home network, and when commercial streaming was new, primitive, and lossy. Remember Pandora? Cool idea, but who wants to sit through ads and not be able to skip over more than a handful of disliked tunes every hour. Then Spotify came along. Then Apple and Amazon jumped in, and that's all she wrote. Eventually, streaming even got around to us audiophiles who desired lossless audio of at least CD resolution. Viva Qobuz!

The EXN100 is Cambridge Audio's state-of-the-art streaming DAC. It's half of the new EX line; the other half is the EXA100 integrated amplifier.

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Gramophone Dreams Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Gramophone Dreams #95: The Voxativ Hagen2 Monitor loudspeaker

Herb Reichert
I think I just found the perfect Herb speaker. It uses a hand-crafted 5" wide-range driver with a cone made from Japanese calligraphy paper. It rolls off around 50Hz at the bottom and 30kHz at the top. It has no crossover. Its cabinet is made of MDF that responds loudly when I tap it with my fingernails. Inside is what its designer calls a "short horn," which appears to harmlessly disperse back-cone energy while adding energy below the driver's cutoff frequency. Mainly, though, it's a perfect Herb speaker because it is naturally phase coherent. And sparkplug fast. And completely unmuffled.

This speaker I'm describing is Voxativ's new Hagen2 Monitor. To say it is a "Herb speaker" is to distinguish it from a John, Jason, or Kal speaker, or even a Ken or Alex speaker. If you want to know what kind of sound an audio reviewer values, notice which speakers they embrace, how well they understand them, and how long they stick with them.

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Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Philharmonic Audio BMR Monitor loudspeaker

Robert Schryer
Let's get this out of the way: The BMR Monitor may be a monitor, but it isn't a bookshelf or desktop speaker any more than a yacht is a dinghy. Heave a slick-surfaced, 32lb BMR from its shipping carton, then wrap your arms around its svelte figure, with its fancy array of drivers and rich-colored piano-lacquer finish, and you'll understand this speaker deserves better than to be tucked away amid books or flanking a computer screen.

I was so enamored by the look of the BMR Monitor, I initially thought its name didn't do it justice. It sounded too nondescript. But with time and growing familiarity, I came to find the BMR moniker fitting—dare I say sleekly masculine sounding, like a phonetic cross between "Bimmer" and a wolf growl. The BMR Monitor—there's also a BMR Tower—is so named for its midrange driver—a Balanced Mode Radiator. We don't come across many of these in our hobby, but it's not new: The technology was invented in 1925.

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Audacious Audio Tonearm Reviews Turntable Reviews

J.Sikora Standard Max Supreme turntable, KV9 Max Zirconium tonearm

Ken Micallef
In his review of the J.Sikora Initial turntable, Stereophile's resident artist/sage Herb Reichert wrote, "Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination."

When it comes to playing records, I too have a ritual. It involves carefully cleaning the vinyl, first on a Pro-Ject VC-33, followed by immersion in a HumminGuru Ultrasonic vinyl cleaner. Before and after, I inspect the record's grooves with a pricey VisibleDust Quasar R magnifier. Only then—black coffee hot, glasses cleaned, stylus brushed free of contaminants, notepad at hand—am I ready to receive the messages ingrained in a shiny black vinyl disc.

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Montreal Audiofest 2025

Nothing but Bryston

Robert Schryer
Bryston CEO James Tanner is not only an Audiofest regular but an affable, down-to-earth guy who refuses to use either high-end cabling or hi-rez files at his show demos. Why? Because he doesn’t want visitors to think that the sound from his system is shaped by anything other than Bryston gear. That doesn’t mean he denies that better-designed cables or hi-rez files through his streamer will elevate sound quality—only that, when you hear his system at a show, you know exactly what Bryston gear sounds like. I found that an interesting viewpoint.
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Phono Accessory Reviews Spin Doctor

Spin Doctor #23: The Loricraft PRC6i record cleaning machine and the WallySkater v2.1 Pro

Michael Trei
In my March Spin Doctor column, I gave an overview of my experiences cleaning records over the last 50-plus years and the advances in record cleaning technology over that time. My review of the HumminGuru NOVA ultrasonic record cleaner focused on that increasingly popular approach to record cleaning, using ultrasonic cavitation instead of scrubbing the record with a brush. But if there's one thing I've learned in that half-century of playing around with audio gear, it's that it can be a mistake to embrace a new technology just because of its newness, dismissing what came before as obsolete. The vinyl record itself is a good example of a technology discarded as obsolete, then embraced again by new (and old) generations. You can add vacuum-tube amplifiers, analog tape, and much else in our hobby to that list.
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Brilliant Corners Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Brilliant Corners #25: Devon Turnbull and the Klipsch-Ojas kO-R1 loudspeaker

Alex Halberstadt
"Paul Klipsch was a genius," Roy Delgado told me recently, with the sound of genuine amazement in his voice. "Me, I'm just a tinkerer." I've spoken to Delgado, Klipsch's chief audio engineer, a handful of times over the past few years and find him affable, plainspoken, and almost absurdly humble. His LinkedIn page describes him simply as "engineer at Klipsch." His bio on the Klipsch Museum website lists his interests as "a closer relationship with God [and] the pursuit of the ever-elusive largemouth bass." To be sure, Delgado holds several patents, has an intimidating grasp of loudspeaker design, and is anything but a tinkerer. But it was still weird to see him—dressed in the T-shirt, light jeans, and work boots of an Arkansas fishing enthusiast—at the Nine Orchard Hotel during last year's New York Fashion Week.

We were there for the launch of a loudspeaker, a collaboration between the Little Rock–based Klipsch Group and Ojas, the nom de solder of artist and designer Devon Turnbull.

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Aural Robert

Holly Cole's Dark Moon

Robert Baird
Discovering music as it is being recorded—singer Holly Cole seeks that kind of spontaneity on her recordings including her latest, Dark Moon on Rumpus Room/UMG Records. As she put it, she wanted this record with her longtime quartet to capture "the moment when the light turns on for us."

"On Dark Moon, you hear the essence of when we discover a song," she said during a recent interview. "We had very brief rehearsals, and then went in and recorded. I had a lot of faith in this band, and that's why I cherry-picked them. They know me, they know I'm a minimalist, and we were able to arrange in the studio. Some of the tracks are first takes. The more complex the arrangement, the longer it took. They are all three, four takes at the most. People have to be hard listeners in this band, or it will fail. That's the case on Temptation, and that's on this record."

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