The stylus that cuts the grooves in your favorite records is best described, in simple terms, as "chisel-shaped." The most accurate playback stylithe "extreme" ones that extract the maximum amount of information from the grooveshave a similar shape, with sharper and more severe contact edges than a standard elliptical stylus, itself an advance over spherical styli.
At a well-organized Munich press conference, Danish speaker company Raidho, now owned by Dantax, introduced the successor to the X1, the Raidho X1t Super Mini Monitor (5800, presumably for the pair and equivalent to US$6210). The speaker is equipped with the company's planar-magnetic ribbon tweeter, which claims 50 times less mass than conventional dome tweeters; a 5.25" tantalum-coated ceramic-on-aluminum midbass driver, which claims to raise breakup modes to 15kHz; and a rear port. Frequency range is 70Hz50kHz, impedance >6 ohms, sensitivity 85dB, and black piano and white piano finishes.
Finally, after three dark years of COVID-related cancellations and postponements, one of audiophilia's biggest and most important shows, Munich High End 2022, took place on ThursdaySunday, May 1922, at the city's huge MOC.
Great hi-fi can give you goosebumps. And it relates to another source of horripilation: live music, and its recordings. I've also always been a live music junkieever since I was a kid.
I was fortunate to have grown up attending the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Pops Orchestra's "LolliPops" children's concerts. I'd seen some tepid live acts as a kid (ie, Donny and Marie). But nothing prepared me for my first rock concert. It, um, rocked my world.
Unless you live under a rock, you've followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You know something about sanctions against Russia and Russia's responses to those sanctions. If, in addition to not living under a rock, you're a tube-audio aficionado or electric guitar nut, you may have thought about a likely consequence of that war that's far less momentous than the destruction and carnage we see on TV: Will I be able to get new tubes for my amplifier? Especially those lovely Russia-made tubes.
National pride is the damnedest thing. When I was growing up in the Netherlands, schoolchildren were taught that the inventor of the printing press was a Dutchman named Laurens Janszoon Coster. Germany's Johannes Gutenberg was waved away as an also-ran, if he was mentioned at all.
I wrote about the music industry's impressive recovery in the February 2022 AWSI. Robust LP sales were a headline item of that report, but they're a sideshow: Paid-subscription streaming is what is bringing the industry back.
When I wrote that, 2021 wasn't quite over, so year-end financials weren't available. They're available now.