LATEST ADDITIONS

Focal and Naim Debut Diva Utopia: A Fully Active, Wireless, High-End Loudspeaker Lands in the US

Ken Micallef | Oct 10, 2024

The Focal Diva Utopia loudspeaker made its US debut in New York City this past week, showcasing the combined expertise of French and English partners Focal and Naim in their first fully active, wireless, and connected loudspeaker.

Focal and Naim Audio CEO Cedrick Boutonet and group marketing manager Réjean Bedel were on hand to introduce the Diva Utopia at Manhattan’s Par Excellence store located in NYC’s fashionable East Village and the Bowery, where the city’s derelict community once held sway, now replaced by hip cafés and bars.

Integrated Amp Reviews

Hegel H400 streaming integrated amplifier

Tom Fine | Oct 10, 2024

The Internet of Things has arrived at the stereo rack. Many hi-fi systems are now connected to the wider world, controlled by phones and tablets. Complex front panels with many switches and buttons have practically vanished; those still around are retro pieces or style statements. Little front-panel touchscreens with complex menu trees have been rendered vestigial or at least redundant. Designers of receivers, integrated amplifiers, and DACs must now at least consider incorporating a streaming module and a device-control app. In certain component categories and certain price brackets, a built-in app-controlled streamer is now a key part of the value proposition, much as a tuner was back in the days of terrestrial radio.

The Hegel H400 combines the functions of an integrated amplifier, DAC, and streamer.

Munich 2024

Visiting Innuos in Portugal

Jason Victor Serinus | Oct 09, 2024

Less than two weeks before the start of Munich High End 2024, I spent several days in Faro, Portugal (footnote 1), touring the modern 1000-square-meter headquarters and manufacturing facility of digital-audio company Innuos. My hosts were Amelia Santos, chief executive officer, and and Nuno Vitorino, chief technology officer.

My Back Pages

"Gloomy Sunday": The Most Notorious Song I Know

Rogier van Bakel | Oct 09, 2024

Editor's Note: This article is in part about depression and suicide. If you think of harming yourself, the National Suicide Hotline is there to help: 1-800-273-TALK.

When German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, he intended for readers to finish it, but not, you know, to end it. To Goethe's disbelief, his novel sparked a spate of suicides. The title character, whose obsessive love for a married woman was unrequited, ended up shooting himself, and soon the copycatting started. Young men of the era would dress just as the fictional Werther had—yellow trousers, blue jacket—and use a similar pistol. Often, a copy of the book was found at the scene. The number of deaths was unsettling enough that Italy and Denmark banned Goethe's novel. The German city of Leipzig even outlawed Werther-style clothes for a while. The phenomenon is now known as the Werther effect.

Sponsored

Celebrate 25 Years of High-End Audio at Audio Vision San Francisco

Stereophile Staff | Oct 06, 2024

Please join us for a Weekend of celebration of our 25 years in high end audio in San Francisco.

Dates and Times:

Friday, October 25th: 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Saturday, October 26th: 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Sunday, October 27th: 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Featuring premiers from Technics, Stenheim, Audeze, Woo Audio, Ideon Audio, Dynaudio, Chord Electronics, Audiovector, Nordost, and YG Acoustics.

Audacious Audio Solid State Power Amp Reviews

Burmester 218 power amplifier

Jason Victor Serinus | Oct 04, 2024

As much as I tinkered with a little crystal radio as a child and started reading stereo magazines in high school, it wasn't until my early 30s that I half-stumbled into the higher end of the hi-fi sphere. As I progressed from used Advents to used Spicas and began to experiment with speaker cables, more and more names of high-end brands entered my consciousness. Burmester (founded in 1977), and some of the other higher-priced components from overseas whose looks seemed commensurate with their prices, held an outsized fascination for me. What about them, other than their visual appearance, accounted for their vaunted reputations and cost?

ReDiscoveries

ReDiscoveries #8: Louis Armstrong in London

Robert Baird | Oct 03, 2024

No jazz-centric visit to New York City is complete without a trek out to Queens. At 46th Street in Sunnyside stands the apartment building where famed cornetist Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke's alcoholism finally killed him in 1931. Farther out, in Corona, is the newly enlarged and expanded Louis Armstrong House Museum. The actual house Armstrong bought in 1943 and lived in until his death in 1971 is just the way it was when his fourth wife, Lucille, died there in 1983. The long white couches, bright blue kitchen cabinets, and wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape decks behind his desk in the upstairs den remain, all extraordinarily well-preserved. Just north of there, in Flushing Cemetery, you can visit Armstrong's grave.

Pops, as he was affectionately known by friends and fans, was an inveterate maker of scrapbooks and tapes of his music. By spring 1969, he had a pair of Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder/players up and running. One of his then-new treasures was a set of tapes made by the BBC from television broadcasts recorded the preceding summer. Music from those tapes—13 tracks in all, four for the first time ever—has just been released on CD, LP, and streaming, as Louis in London.

Gramophone Dreams Solid State Power Amp Reviews

Gramophone Dreams #89: Road Trip, Rare Audio Systems, and the First Watt SIT-4

Herb Reichert | Oct 02, 2024

Throughout my hundred years, I've told everyone who'd listen: If it's adventure you seek, the best way to find it is to stand on the right corner at the right time wearing the right hat, and when the limo pulls up and the driver says, "Get in," do not ask where it is going.

This strategy has served my life story well. It has placed me without striving in countless cinema-worthy locations, hanging with all types of legend-worthy characters.

Lately, that corner where I stand wearing the right hat is in front of the Polish newsstand at the intersection of Manhattan and Greenpoint Avenues in Brooklyn.

Rabbit Holes

Rabbit Holes #12: Julius Eastman's Different Kind of Swing

Kurt Gottschalk | Oct 01, 2024

New recordings of Julius Eastman compositions aren't as rare as they were a decade ago. Eastman's profile has grown with each repetition of his story, which seems to become more dramatic with each iteration. Trained at the Curtis Institute of Music; worked with Peter Maxwell Davies, Meredith Monk, and Petr Kotik; composed significant works often for instrument multiples (four pianos, 10 cellos); then drugs, homelessness, and dying alone in a hospital at the age of 49. A recent resurrection has brought new recordings, new research, and new visibility. An exciting recent realization of his 1974 composition Femenine, recorded jointly by Talea Ensemble and Harlem Chamber Players, offers fresh perspective. It led me to listen to some older releases, some with the composer himself performing.

Budget Component Reviews Integrated Amp Reviews

Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amplifier

Herb Reichert | Sep 27, 2024

In 1989, I bought my second pair of Rogers LS3/5a's from a guy on Staten Island who had them hooked up to a Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amplifier. After playing the speakers for me, he began removing his zip-cord speaker cables and paused to show me how, at the amplifier end, his red-plastic Pomona Electronics banana plugs had partially melted from the A1's heat. We both laughed.

After it first appeared in 1985, the A1 quickly became famous for its hot top plate. The top plate got as hot as it did because it was used as a heatsink for the output transistors, which were biased highly into class-A. The A1's hot top made tabloid headlines, but for me it was its bold, sinewy, un-transistory sound and timeless, sharply drawn styling that distinguished it from cooler running Brit-fi competitors such as Audiolab's 8000A, Creek's 4040, A&R Cambridge's A60, and NAD's 3020.

Now it's back, priced at $1779, looking and feeling cooler than before.

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