LATEST ADDITIONS

Saturday October 20, 1–6pm, Jared Sacks, Channel Classics Records' founder, producer, and engineer as well as NativeDSD Music's co-founder & CEO, will give a DSD Listening Demo in collaboration with Mytek at Innovative Audio Video Showroom (150 E 58th Street, New York, NY 10155).

Sacks will walk listeners through some of his multi–award-winning Channel Classics DSD recordings as well as some of the most popular and noteworthy DSD tracks from other labels. From Analog Tape Transfers Direct-to-DSD by the team at 2xHD-Mastering, to the unedited/unprocessed one-take DSD256 recordings from labels such as Eudora Records and Just Listen Records. Samples in DSD are available for Free at the Native DSD Music Store.

When I began writing for Stereophile, I dreaded doing comparisons. They were stressful and tedious—and what if I got them wrong? But I quickly learned: Not only do readers enjoy comparisons, they need them. How else might they imagine the relative merits of the component under consideration? Once I realized this, I began acquiring a range of reference amplifiers.

But conspicuously missing from my audio menagerie has been a fast, neutral, 100Wpc tube amp to put more pop, fire, and maybe a little glow, into the Harbeth M30.2s.

"At what price does a high-end product cease to exist for the 'normal' audiophile?" This question, which I asked in the February 2017 issue, was a follow-up to one I'd asked in our April 2011 issue: "If all someone is offered is a $150,000 pair of speakers . . . that person will walk away from this hobby, or build his or her system by buying only used equipment. Either consumer choice turns the price spiral into a death spiral for manufacturers."

On Thursday, October 18, beginning at 7:00pm, Gryphon Audio Designs distributor On A Higher Note and New York retailer Joseph Cali Systems Design will launch Gryphon's new Zena preamplifier at the Gryphon Audio Loft at 857 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10003…

Forty years after he wrote his two-movement Tabula Rasa for violinist Gidon Kremer, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, 83, is still alive, engaged and composing. Hence it should come as no surprise that when violinist Viktoria Mullova and conductor Paavo Järvi contacted Pärt about their plan to record five of his works for violin and various instruments for their Onyx album, Arvo Pärt, the conductor attended the recording sessions.

There are always chance encounters at an audio show, and when I went to meet AVTech America's general manager Keith Pray (left) and Hi-Fi News editor Paul Miller (right) to discuss, among other things, November's Hi-Fi News Show in Windsor, England, Audeze CEO Sankar Thiagasamudram was with them holding a sample of the California company's new Mobius head-tracking headphone ($399). The Mobius uses planar-magnetic diaphragms like the upmarket Audeze cans, but once zero'd in the forward direction, will keep the soundstage aimed at that direction when the user moves his head. In this the Mobius is similar to the Smyth Realiser, but is both considerably more affordable and doesn't need an external control unit. This headphone is not aimed at the high-end audio market but is ideal for gamers, who need the stereo soundstage to remain aligned with the image on the screen.

I started my tour of RMAF in the ground-floor room next to the restaurant hosted by Colorado dealer ListenUp. There I did a double-take—wasn't that a JBL Century L100 three-way loudspeaker, with its distinctive Quadrex foam grille? No, this was the L100 Classic ($4000/pair), released by JBL Synthesis to celebrate the 48 years since this speaker was first released. "A modern take on a time-honored legend," said the press release, which is just as well because I was never a fan of the original, even though it was the bestselling loudspeaker in JBL's history.