What is the angular separation of your loudspeakers as viewed from your favorite chair? Whatever your answer, it's wrong. Of course I don't mean that it's a factually incorrect answer, just that any single value of subtended angle cannot be ideal for all recordings.
Things are changing rapidly in the world of professional digital audio. After a decade of stability, with slow but steady improvement in the quality of 16-bit, 44.1kHz audio, the cry among audio engineers is now "24/96!"—meaning 24-bit data sampled at 96kHz. Not coincidentally, DVD offers audiophiles a medium with the potential for playing back music encoded at this new mastering standard.
Suppose you've put aside some cash for a new preamp. You survey the field and zero in on the Musical Ecstasy 1000 and the Sonic Nirvana Special. Both got good reviews in all the magazines, they look great, and each will set you back about the same number of mortgage payments. So you visit your dealer and camp out for a weekend or two. You listen, you think, you walk around the store, you listen some more, you recalculate your tax return. You listen some more. Finally, you have a winner. "I want that one," you tell your dealer; "the Sonic Nirvana."
<B>John Atkinson sets the stage</B><BR> Nothing seems to polarize people as much as the vexed question concerning the importance of audible differences between amplifiers. If you think there <I>are</I> subjective differences, you're an audiophile; if you don't, you're not. And as any glance at an appropriate issue of <I>Consumer Reports</I>—<I>the</I> publication for non-audiophiles—will confirm, the established wisdom is that once the price of an amplifier or receiver crosses a certain threshold, any further improvement in sound quality becomes irrelevant, in that it puts the price up for no apparent gain. In other words, when it comes to amplification, there is such a thing as being "too" good. Yet, as a reader of this magazine, I would expect that not only have you been exposed to real subjective quality differences between amplifiers that <I>Consumer Reports</I> would regard as sounding identical, you have made purchasing decisions made on the basis of hearing such differences.
<B>CHARLES LLOYD: <I>Canto</I></B><BR> Charles LLoyd, tenor sax, Tibetan oboe; Bobo Stenson, piano; Anders Jormin, bass; Billy Hart, drums.<BR> ECM 78118-21635-2 (CD). 1996. Manfred Eicher, prod; Jan Erik Kongshaug, eng. DDD. TT: 65:18<BR> Performance <B>****½</B><BR> Sonics <B>****½</B>
Some of the most innovative thinking on hybrid circuit design these days seems to come from Russian designers. As a group, they are technically very well educated, pragmatic, and unfettered by American high-end didacticism.
"When I find something that works," John Candy leered, "I stick with it!" I have no idea if the folks at Stax Industries are fans of <I>Splash</I> or not, but they've certainly taken Candy's philosophy as their own. Despite manufacturing superb—if demanding—loudspeakers and electronics for the last 15 years or so, Stax has been best known for producing one thing: electrostatic ear-speakers, aka headphones.
<B>GUY CLARK: <I>Keepers</I></B><BR> Sugar Hill SHCD-1055 (CD). 1997. Guy Clark, prod.; Miles Wilkinson, prod., eng.; Johnny Rosen, eng. AAD? TT: 64:45<BR> Performance <B>****½</B><BR> Sonics <B>*****</B></FONT>
Compuserve's CEAUDIO forum has been buzzing in recent weeks about audio cables. The subject even spilled over into an April meeting of the New York chapter of the Audio Engineering Society (see Wes Phillips's report in this month's "Industry Update"). Nearly two decades after Polk, Fulton, and Monster Cable raised our collective consciousness about the differences cable choice can make in an audio system, the debate still rages between audiophiles and some members of the engineering community. "High-priced tone controls" is how some engineers dismiss the subject of cables, while admitting that they <I>can</I> sound different. Other engineers adopt the "Hard Objectivist" line that if there are differences to be heard between cables, differences in the lumped electrical parameters of resistance (R), inductance (L), and capacitance (C) are all that are required to explain such differences.