The Terrific HiFiMAN HE400S Planar Magnetic Headphones
This story originally appeared at InnerFidelity.com
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Watch out HD 600, there's a new headphone in town.
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Arcam FMJ P49 power amplifier
I first met electronics engineer John Dawson in 1979, at a British audio show. The company he'd co-founded, A&R Cambridge, had just launched the A60, a slim, elegant-looking, 40Wpc integrated amplifier costing only £99 (then equivalent to $217).
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By the time I reviewed the Mk.2 version, in the October 1984 issue of Hi-Fi News & Record Review, the A60's price had risen to £199 ($248), the company was now called Arcam, and more than 22,000 A60s had been sold, making it one of the best-selling amplifiers in England. While preparing that review I had visited Arcam's factory, near the English town of Ely, where Dawson had shown me filing cabinets containing a separate manufacturing report for each and every one of those A60s.
Listening #155
Please don't tell her I said this, but lately, my wife has been getting twitchy about my records. Twitchy as in: She wants me to sell them. Or at least some of them.
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I have only myself to blame. For years, I have shared with her my every joy that came of finding, at a lawn sale or garage sale or on eBay or at a record store whose proprietors "had no idea what this thing is worth," some rare and valuable treasure. And therein lay another facet of my problem: As often as I would rejoice at the music I was poised to enjoy, or the sheer pleasure of acquiring something rare and well made, I would roll, pig-like, in the pleasure of the thing's potential monetary value. Old Testamentstyle dark clouds fill the sky outside my window even as I type this.
Canada's TAVES Starts Friday
Canada's biggest three-day consumer audio and lots more show, TAVES, is poised to break its former attendance record when it opens in Toronto, Ontario on October 30. Newly reframed as "Canada's Ultimate Consumer Electronics Show," it opens less than a month after Denver's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, and a mere week before the start of the Westchester County version of the New York Audio Show.
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Shakin' it with the Subpac S2 Headphone Subwoofer
This story originally appeared at InnerFidelity.com
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Over the years I've tried a number of headphone subwoofer gadgets. Most didn't work well at all. The Subpac S2 is a whole 'nother story.
Grind & Groove
They live to seek the little black holy grail…with the big hole in the middle.
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Dealer Event in Spokane, Tuesday October 27
Tuesday, October 27, 69pm: Huppin's (8016 North Division, Spokane) will host an evening of music, hi-fi, and technology. Manufacturer representatives from AudioQuest, Klipsch, MartinLogan, and McIntosh will be on hand to share new products, play great music, and answer questions.
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Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 800 integrated amplifier
Nuvistorsminiature, small-signal, vacuum tubes made of metal and ceramicwere introduced by RCA in 1959, at the dawn of the transistor revolution. RCA used them throughout the 1960s in its New Vista line of television sets, mostly in the tuner section. But by the early 1970s, solid-state devices had all but replaced tubes, nuvistors included (with a few notable exceptions). Ampex based the electronics of its well-regarded, late-'60s MR-70 open-reel tape deck on nuvistors, which were also used in microphone preamplifiersin both cases for their very low noise and reputation for reliability and long life. For a time, Conrad-Johnson used them as well. While nuvistors may seem exotic today, they're hardly rare. On eBay you can find for sale hundreds if not thousands of used and new-old stock (NOS) nuvistors, as well as nuvistor sockets, without which the tubes are less easy to implement. (But they can be, and often are, hard-wired into a circuit.)
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Chord Electronics Hugo TT D/A headphone amplifier
The British company Chord Electronics has always seemed to me to be audio's crazy uncle: Crazy like a fox, maybe, but definitely marching to their own tune. Their casework design often borders on the gratuitously provocative, challenging audiophiles' ideas about good taste. Yet many of my audio pals swear by the sound of Chord components, and I've heard them shine in many respectable showrooms.
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Starting Over Again for the First Time
"There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind," Duke Ellington is famously supposed to have said. But that doesn't tell us how to recognize "good music," and it doesn't define good. Nor will this essay. Many have described the music of, say, Mozart or J.S. Bach with such phrases as the music of heaven or the mind of God orespecially Bach's musicthat it embodies the basic structure of the universe/existence/reality. I've said such things myself.
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