KEF Debuts New Finishes for Blade One Meta and Blade Two Meta

Sennheiser Drops HDB 630 Wireless Headphones

LATEST ADDITIONS

Adams Takes the Violin Up, Down, Around, and Through

Jason Victor Serinus Jun 20, 2018

Twenty-five years after the premiere of John Adams' Violin Concerto, the music remains as vital, exhilarating, and strangely moving as the day it was birthed. An extremely demanding work, its three contrasting movements present a triathlon challenge of sorts to anyone who dares try to play them.

Here, she who rises to the challenge is violinist Leila Josefowicz. Provocatively pictured on the CD cover as a curious cross between an athlete in repose and Rodin's reflective thinker...

Art Dudley Listening Powerline Accessory Reviews

Listening #187: Shindo Mr. T

Art Dudley Jun 19, 2018

In the rural home in Cherry Valley, NY that my family and I inhabited from 2003 to 2017, we had dirty water but clean electricity. Evidence of the latter was seen in the results of tests performed by a technician from the local utility, National GridI told him I intended to do commercial sound recording on site, which was close enough to the truth that I considered my sin venal rather than mortaland heard in the sound of my playback system, which rejected as superfluous or worse all of the AC-conditioning products I tried there.

Music and Recording Features

Highway 61 Revisited

Jim Austin Jun 19, 2018

Photos: Jim Austin

I'm sitting in a rented Nissan just off Highway 61yes, that Highway 61looking out at a Shell station through the bug-stained windshield and across a litter-strewn, not-yet-planted cotton field. It's late March, and I've just left Clarksdale, Mississippi, on my way to Memphis. Leaving Clarksdale made me thoughtful, so I've pulled over to jot down a few notes.

Jason Victor Serinus

Kjell Tore Innervik: Utopias

Jason Victor Serinus Jun 18, 2018

If the two works on this recording, Xenakis's Psappha (1975) and Feldman's The King of Denmark (1964), aren't exactly new, their construction and sound are radical in the extreme.

Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Wilson Audio Specialties Alexia Series 2 loudspeaker

John Atkinson Jun 14, 2018

One of the benefits of being a reviewer is that, of the large number of products that pass through my listening room, occasionally there are those that I really would like to see take up more permanent residence. One of these was Wilson Audio Specialties' Alexia loudspeaker, which I reviewed in December 2013. "Its clarity, its uncolored, full-range balance, its flexibility in setup and optimization, and most of all its sheer musicality, are, if not unrivaled, rare," I wrote, and concluded: "If I were to retire tomorrow, the Wilson Alexia would be the speaker I would buy to provide the musical accompaniment to that retirement." Nothing I subsequently heard disabused me of that dream, though a couple of other speakers, in particular Vivid Audio's Giya G3 and KEF's Blade Two, joined the Alexia on my bucket list.

Solid State Power Amp Reviews

AkitikA GT-102 power amplifier

Herb Reichert Jun 14, 2018

An e-mail from an old audiophile pal: "Herb, my buddy owns a recording studio, and he told me one of his $10k reference amplifiers stopped working and the manufacturer said it would take months to be repaired. So he went online and bought this 60W AkitikA solid-state amplifier to use while his big amp was being repaired. The trouble is, the kit cost only $314. (The studio guy bought his assembled and tested for $488.) Now, he likes the AkitikA more than his broke-down reference amp."

As We See It

The Sound and the Image

Jim Austin Jun 12, 2018

It's not surprising that many people, like me, love nice cameras and good stereo gear. In my worse moments, I attribute this to mere consumerism: We love expensive stuff and the thrill of buying something new, whether for reproducing music or creating visual images. In my better moments, it's clear to me that there's more than that to this common taste for audio and photography, and more to the hobby of so-called perfectionist audio.

Recording of the Month

Recording of July 2018: Life Of

Jon Iverson Jun 12, 2018

Steve Tibbetts: Life Of
Steve Tibbetts, 12-string guitar, piano; Michelle Kinney, cello, drones; Marc Anderson, percussion, handpan
ECM 2599 (CD). 2018. An ECM production; Steve Tibbetts, eng.; Greg Reierson, eng., mastering. DDD. TT: 50:40
Performance *****
Sonics *****

The sound of Steve Tibbetts's guitar music is uniqueone need hear only a measure or two of his new album to identify the distinct tang of his playing. Common wisdom is that a guitarist's sound is in the hands and fingers, but Tibbetts has another trick: his weathered, 50-year-old Martin D12-20 12-string acoustic guitar.

Jason Victor Serinus

Bernstein's Great Mahler Song Cycles in Hi-Rez

Jason Victor Serinus Jun 10, 2018

Why should you or anyone care about a 24/192 download reissue of recordings of two Mahler song cycles that were made in Vienna and New York in 1968 by conductor Leonard Bernstein and three of his favorite singers, mezzo Christa Ludwig, her bass-baritone husband Walter Berry, and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau? After all, the recordings are "old" and the music much older, all but one of the artists is dead, the language is German, and the reissue lacks lyrics and translations . . .

News

The Hot Shade of July

Stereophile Staff Jun 08, 2018

But maybe not so hot in the listening room, where you can get absorbed reading the latest issue of Stereophile. The expensive but superb-sounding Wilson Alexia 2 speaker is featured on the cover and reviewed inside, but also inside this issue is a review of the least expensive amplifier we have reviewed in decades, AkitikA's GT-102, which costs just $314 as a kit and $488 assembled and tested.