Banished Word List
What a great idea. Can I add <I>absitively</I>?
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Is Cantonese Disappearing?
Languages change and die all the time, but can one spoken by so many people really be vanishing?
Obviously: Leaving Las Vegas
I'm sitting in the hotel lobby, at a small brown table, with Wes Phillips. Our laptops are caught in a long embrace, staring at one another, making a sort of _/ \_
The Threshold Stasis is Back
The fabled Threshold Stasis amplifier is back. The S/350 reissue, built in China by Threshold International Ltd., is said to have the same circuit as the original, but with updated components. The original cost $3900 in 1992, so for those who long to own this famous amplifier, the S/350 reissue at $2000 is a bargain!
Silverline's New Prelude
Silverline Audio's new Prelude is a slim floorstander combining an aluminum-dome tweeter with two 3.5" aluminum/magnesium-alloy mid/woofers. Designer Alan Yun was running the speakers with a pair of Pass X600s (600Wpc), an unusual combination intended to show the speaker's potential for dynamics and bass extension—and it certainly did that. Nice, smooth sound, too. The Prelude seems like a real bargain at $1200/pair.
Anything from the recent CES pique your interest?
A wide variety of audio products, from portable to extreme, are announced every year at the Consumer Electronics Show. Anything from the recent CES pique your interest?
Upsampled CDs Rock in the dCS Room
We <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/122605dcs/">reported</A> a couple of weeks back about the management buyout at English digital specialist dCS. CES saw the first public showing of the new products we wrote about, including the Verdi Encore SACD transport, which upsamples CDs to a DSD stream to feed a dCS DAC, such as the Elgar Plus seen here beneath the transport with both clocked by the dCS Verona that I <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/305dcs/">reviewed a year ago</A>. The rest of the dem system was a pair of Verity Parsifal speakers driven by a VTL S-400 amplifier and VTL's new TL-6.5 line preamp: the sound on a cut from the new Jackson Browne CD that Robert Baird writes about in the January 2006 <I>Stereophile</I> was effortlessly smooth, analog-like in the ease of musical communication. And on the top of the Encore is the award we presented to dCS at CES for the original LaScala transport being one of our two <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/features/1205poty/index3.html">Joint Digital Products of 2005</A>.
Pssst, Hey Kid!
Walking through the halls of T.H.E. Show, Jon Iverson and I were caught by John DeVore as we tried to cruise the halls quickly. "You've got to hear this," he gushed. "This is probably the worst sound and the best music you'll hear at the show."
Ion-ization
Amphion's Anssi Hyvönen was happy to demo his tiny Ions ($1350/pair). The diminutive two-ways sport a 1" titanium tweeter and a 4.5" midrange/woofer, and weigh an easy to lift 10.5 pounds. They sound pretty darn big, though. I enjoyed them in a system with a T+A 1535 surround sound receiver and T+A SADV 1245 R DVD player, finding them spacious and three-dimensional. Then HeadRoom's Tyll Hertsens walked into the room and asked, "How do they sound as desktop speakers?"
Audio Research + Wilson + Shirley Horn = Magic
Toward the end of the final day in Las Vegas, I found Kalman Rubinson entranced by the sound of Shirley Horn singing and playing piano in the Audio Research room at T.H.E. Show. A pair of the new Mk.2 version of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/619/">Wilson Sophia</A> speakers was being driven by ARC's Reference 210 monoblocks, a Reference 3 line stage, the Minnesota company's new Ref CD7 player, with cables from Shunyata and Cardas and AC conditioning by Richard Gray. I was equally entranced.