LATEST ADDITIONS

Late last year came an epic audiophile moment: I slapped a final length of tape on the box of the awesome-sounding MSB Diamond DAC (Stereophile, October 2012), in final preparation for its trek to John Atkinson's testing lab, in Brooklyn. Next up was the Bifrost DAC from Schiit Audio. I popped it into my system, where, moments before, the MSB had held court.

From $43,325 to $449. Yowseh!!—the MSB costs almost 100 times as much as the Schiit! Was this even fair?

We're always happy to spread the love of gear (and music) here at the good ole' STP. STP's one of our in office abbreviation for Stereophile. Occasionally, it's STRP. Sometimes it's, "We have to do another issue?", but seriously, we do enjoy making audiophiles happy. It's one of the best parts of the job.

Writing is easy. See? I just did it. Three whole sentences, written between breakfast and lunch. (I had to pause and think about one of them.) Payday, here I come.

It seems I'm always reviewing an integrated amplifier from Creek Audio. It started in the late 1980s, when I fell in love with the capabilities of inexpensive, well-designed audio equipment, sparked by the spectacular sound of a pair of Celestion 5 bookshelf speakers at a Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. I was reading an issue of Hi Fi Heretic (now defunct), for which my friend Art Dudley wrote, and it included a survey of various inexpensive British integrated amplifiers, some of them made by Creek. I was already familiar with the company, but hadn't listened to affordable British electronics since I'd lived in London, in the early '80s. I got a Creek 4140s2 integrated and was amazed at its neutrality, its lack of etched sound, its natural reproduction of instrumental timbres. I ended up buying it, and used it to review bookshelf loudspeakers.

Register to win one of four sets of Audiofly Headphones (MSRP $30 - $200) we are giving away.

According to the company:

Made with high quality materials and precision manufacturing, the AF33 will play its heart out every time and astonish you with its sound quality. It arrives equipped with a custom voiced 9mm dynamic driver for detailed sound reproduction across the entire sonic spectrum . . .

[This Sweepstakes is now closed.]

Many of David Wilson's highly acclaimed, long out-of-print recordings are poised to make old and new generations of audiophiles very happy. On August 1, the first two of a selected batch of Wilson Audiophile Recordings will return to circulation as high-resolution (176.4kHz/24-bit), CD-quality, and MP3 downloads. Distributed by Naxos via a host of mass-market and hi-res digital music stores, including Chandos' "The Classical Shoppe," eClassical24bit, HDMusic, HDTracks, HiResAudio, Linn Records, Onkyo, and Qobuz24bit, the first titles in the series are Recital, James B. Welch's disc of four centuries of organ music, and Beethoven and Enescu Sonatas, performed by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg, this magazine's "Recording of the Month" for February 1984.

John Parks of Hurst, Texas is the winner of Stereophile.com's Monitor Audio Airstream WS100 Sweepstakes. The Monitor Audio Airstream WS100 are desktop speakers that receive a wireless audio signal transmitted on the 2.4GHz band via USB dongle.

John is befuddled. While he has these awesome and convenient desktop speakers, he has no desk! We do not have any desk sweepstakes coming up soon.

Congrats on your win John, and thanks for playing! Hope you find a suitable surface.