LATEST ADDITIONS

AXPONA 2025

Treehaus, DaVa, and Iconoclast: Wood You Believe This System?

Ken Micallef | Apr 28, 2025

Treehaus: The name conjures bark and birdsong, but its products are pure Klangbildvergrößerungsmaschinen*. Rich Pinto of Treehaus Audiolab creates gear that fuses sonic beauty with sculptural woodwork and the control of a practiced hand. All circuitry and internal construction are the work of Radu Tarta, a designer known for his meticulous builds.

Making its world debut at AXPONA, the Treehaus LCR phono preamplifier ($24,000) pairs a tube-rectified outboard power supply with Finemet inductors in LCR configuration and 7308/12AT7 gain stages.

The analog front end included an SME Model 12 MK2 turntable with SME Series V tonearm ($15,599), fitted with a DaVa field-coil cartridge ($9750). A Soulnote D-2 DAC ($5845) handled digital duties.

To step up the cartridge's signal, Pinto used his Treehaus moving-coil transformer ($3000). It’s Urushi coated and offers three selectable ratios. Inside are Shōwa-period, silk-packed Finemet cores, handmade shields, and Cardas RCA connectors.

The signal path continued into the Treehaus Audiolab preamplifier ($19,000), a design that shares the same Finemet DNA. The preamp’s 4P1L stage operates as a directly-heated triode, known for delivering clean, uncolored signal amplification. It uses filament bias and runs capacitor-free in the signal path. The topography also includes Finemet output transformers and 6CJ3 damper diodes for rectification.

The preamp fed a Treehaus Audiolab 300B-2 SET amplifier ($24,000), a two-box design inspired by Susumu Sakuma’s 300B architecture. It features a 10Y/801A driver, Finemet interstage and output transformers, Coleman filament bias, GOSS-core power transformers, and, like the preamp, 6CJ3 damper diodes for rectification.

Completing the system were Pinto’s Phantom of Luxury field-coil loudspeakers ($29,000/pair), an open-baffle design measuring roughly 30" wide and 52" high. Available in live-edge walnut or elm with hard-maple accents, they pair Atelier Rullit Super Aero field-coil drivers with Fostex T900A super tweeters, Miflex caps, and Cardas and Neutrik connectors.

Cables were supplied by Iconoclast; power conditioning by Puritan.

With Goldfrapp and Aphex Twin on the SME ’table, the Treehaus system cast a stage of generous height and panoramic width. Aphex Twin’s manic breakbeats moved with speed and force, the techno grooves nearly lifting me out of my seat. The smallish full-range drivers produced oceanic bass. Most satisfying.

AXPONA 2025

Audio Note UK: Where Techno Glows and Carmen Whispers

Ken Micallef | Apr 28, 2025

Charlotte de Witte’s Sanctum, my current techno obsession, was already spinning when I stepped into the Audio Note UK room. Sales exec Adrian Ford-Crush stood nearby; across the room, founder Peter Qvortrup — the company’s resident iconoclast — paged through Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI, a scathing look at the environmental and ethical costs of artificial intelligence. But then the music took over, as it always does in this room.

Re-Tales

Re-Tales #53: Making Hi-Fi a Viable Career

Julie Mullins | Apr 28, 2025

Last month's column looked at the hi-fi industry's struggles with recruiting and retaining qualified staff. For that article, Specialty Sound and Vision's Anthony Chiarella, also director of sales and marketing for Gryphon Audio and Brinkmann Audio, made a comment that bears repeating here: "If we're going to have a future in hi-fi, we have to make it worthwhile to make a career in hi-fi." How might that be achieved?

Achieving that key objective requires achieving another one: How do we make more people aware that our industry exists?

Audacious Audio Digital Processor Reviews

dCS Varèse Music System D/A Processor

Jason Victor Serinus | Apr 28, 2025 | First Published: Apr 25, 2025

Photo: Paul Miller

It was during a visit to my music room by five members of the small Off-Islanders Audio Society that the magic of the dCS Varèse Music System ($267,500 as reviewed; $305,000 with CD/SACD transport) became clear.

One member had requested the 24/192 version of "Splendido Sundance" from Saturday Night in San Francisco (24/192 FLAC, Columbia-Legacy/Qobuz), performed by Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco de Lucía and recorded live in the Warfield Theatre on December 6, 1980. I'd attended the unveiling of the LP remastering of this recording, presented by the album's co-executive producer, Abey Fon, in the Audio Reference room at High End Munich 2024. The system, which was first class, included a VPI Titan turntable, D'Agostino Relentless preamplifier and Relentless 800 mono amplifiers, a VTL TP-6.5 Series II Signature phono preamplifier, Wilson Audio XVX loudspeakers, Nordost cabling, a Stromtank power generator, and an unheard three-piece dCS Vivaldi APEX music system.

AXPONA 2022

A Quintessence Audio room: Ø Audio, Boulder Amplifiers, dCS, Innuos, and AudioQuest

Jim Austin | Apr 27, 2025

I heard people at the show, including Stereophile writers, were talking about the Ø Audio room—though when I say they were talking about it, I don’t mean that they were saying the company’s name, since no one knew how to do that. I looked it up. Ø is a letter in Norwegian and Danish that comes after the end of our alphabet, after Æ and before Å. If you want to know how to pronounce it, I'll provide a link to a pronunciation guide. You'll notice that the pronunciation in Danish and Norwegian is quite different—though the pronunciation I heard from Norwegian Jonathan Cook to me sounded more like Danish.

Digital Processor Reviews Solid State Preamp Reviews

Ayre Acoustics KX-8 preamplifier

John Atkinson | Apr 27, 2025 | First Published: Apr 25, 2025

For the past decade or so, I haven't been using a preamplifier. The D/A processors I have been using all have volume controls, so I have been feeding their outputs directly to the power amplifiers. It would seem logical that having nothing in the signal path would have less of a degrading effect than a preamp's input and output sockets, switches, volume control, printed circuit-board traces, and active and passive parts, not to mention an additional pair of interconnects. However, with some of the preamplifiers I have auditioned in my system, there was no doubt that the sound quality improved compared with the direct connection from the digital processor.

The most recent of these preamps was the MBL N11 that Jason Victor Serinus reviewed in July 2021, which was preceded by the Pass Labs XP-32 I reviewed in March 2021, the Benchmark LA4 Kalman Rubinson reviewed in January 2020, and going back even further, the Ayre Acoustics KX-R Twenty I reviewed in December 2014, which was one of the products Ayre released to celebrate its 20th year of operation.

I am now reviewing the KX-8 line preamplifier, which costs $6500 in basic form.

AXPONA 2025

Tone Imports and Pitch Perfect Audio: Beyond Muskrat Love

Ken Micallef | Apr 27, 2025

At AXPONA 2025, Jonathan Halpern of Tone Imports and Matt Rotunda of Pitch Perfect Audio teamed up in room 2025. Very au courant. I first met Halpern and speaker designer John DeVore years ago, when both worked at Steve Mishoe’s In Living Stereo, a high-end store in New York. Their careers have long intersected—and so has their gear.

AXPONA 2025

Grimm Audio at AXPONA: Brushstrokes in the Air

Jason Victor Serinus | Apr 27, 2025

It was good to catch up with Eelco Grimm and John-Paul Lizars before sitting down to hear the Grimm Audio LS1c two-way active speaker system with SB1 motion-feedback subwoofer ($38,000–$44,150/pair, depending on finish and tariffs).

AXPONA 2025

Well Pleased AV, QLN, Vinnie Rossi, Merason, Innuos, GigaWatt, SGR: No Vinyl, No Problem

Ken Micallef | Apr 27, 2025

Mark Sossa of Virginia-based distributor Well Pleased AV brought a sweet lineup to Chicago, including the world-premiere Merason Mountain DAC ($20,000).

Audacious Audio Media Server Reviews

Innuos ZENith Next-Gen Streamer-Server

Jim Austin | Apr 27, 2025 | First Published: Apr 23, 2025

The Innuos ZENith Next-Gen ($20,700 as equipped) does what streamer-servers do: store music files, read them into memory, and send them on to a D/A converter to make music. In Innuos's complex (yet logical) lineup of streamers and streamer-servers, the ZENith Next-Gen sits just below the flagship Statement and above the ZENith Mk.3. The ZENith Mk.3 remains in the Innuos lineup for now but will be replaced at AXPONA shortly after this issue hits mailboxes and newsstands.

Though similar in many respects, with a very similar appearance, these two products—the ZENith Next-Gen and the ZENith Mk.3—are very different beasts. There is one rather obvious difference: a CD slot on the Mk.3 (with, of course, a CD drive inside), which makes it easy to rip CDs to the server's internal memory. This feature is absent from the more purist ZENith Next-Gen. But with the Next-Gen you can have your cake and eat it: Attach any USB CD ripper to one of the USB ports, and it will work just the same as the built-in ripper on the Mk.3. The other differences between the Mk.3 and the Next-Gen are less obvious, but those differences go much deeper; see the Details section in this review.

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