LATEST ADDITIONS

Rogue Audio RH-5 preamplifier-headphone amplifier

Every day in my bunker, I use one of a few high-quality headphone amplifiers to double as a line-level preamplifier-controller and operate as the quality-assurance reference for my ongoing audio experiments. I must choose this component carefully, because it determines the upper limit of my system's ability to reveal any subtle differences among components under review.
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The Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request 50th Anniversary Edition

While it may elicit shakes of the head, nasty, distasteful looks, or vociferous yawps about its being nothing more than a load of warmed-over psychedelic pandering, the time may have come to listen again to Their Satanic Majesties Request, the much-maligned 1967 album by the Rolling Stones—and perhaps think of it in a slightly more humane light. Few records from that or any other era have been as widely savaged. It's easy to make the argument that any record with such a pretentious title deserves to be ridiculed. The music itself is scattered and feels unfinished in spots. Then there's that cover image.
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Listening #179

Dear Reader,

Not long ago, I lost patience with coffee.

Before that, I'd never quite made it to coffee-nerd status, but I had all four wheels on the onramp. A few years ago I got rid of my cheap coffeemaker and switched to a French press, because it was more hands-on. I started buying whole beans instead of ground coffee, and grinding them in the store's grinder, on its coarsest setting. When that wouldn't do, I bought an inexpensive electric coffee grinder. When that wouldn't do, I bought a manual grinder.

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Day 2 at TAVES

If you do a Google search for "loudspeaker" combined with "full-range," "line source," "one-way," and "modular," you'll get results that match some, but not all, of the characteristics of the Ruel Audio R7. The Audience ClearAudient 16+16 comes the closest, with 16 drivers firing forward and 16 to the back, but its small full-range drivers are supplemented with eight 6x9" passive radiators, and it does not have modular construction. Plus, it appears not to be in production. For that matter, Google misses Ruel, but it has been granted a provisional patent.
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