Friday, June 20th, was Elizabeth Donovan's last day at work. We left the office together, and walked across the street to Mulligan's Pub. Elizabeth carried a large backpack, a box of books, a lamp. The place was packed, but we found a little space by the door, beneath an air conditioning unit.
After a year spent exploring the best that can be obtained from minimonitor loudspeakers, I embarked on what will be an equally long examination of what floorstanding towers have to offer. I began with the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/1207sonus">Sonus Faber Cremona Elipsa</A> ($20,800/pair) in December 2007, followed in 2008 by: in February, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/208kef">KEF Reference 207/2</A> ($20,000/pair); in April, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/408psb">PSB Synchrony One</A> ($4500/pair); and in May, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/508mag">Magico V3</A> ($25,000/pair). For this review, I've been listening to a speaker aimed at those with shallower pockets than are required even for the PSB: the Avalon NP Evolution 2.0, which costs just $1995/pair.
In the waning days of 2007, I delivered some small audio doohickey to John Atkinson one weekend afternoon. "Come down to the listening room," he said. "I want you to hear something."
Fortunately, I didn't have to rob any banks or max out my credit cards this weekend. I didn't even have to travel to Africa. The crazy heat and humidity (Footnote for Jaclyn Gooding), however, made it feel like high noon in the Kalahari Desert. Simply sitting at my kitchen table, my laptop (Footnote for AlexO) open and our April 2008 issue turned to page 155, was a kind of dull, hot torture.
"Where do you want 'em?" Doug'n'David (of <I>Stereophile</I>'s shipping and receiving, not your favorite morning drive-time talk radio co-hosts) had just wrestled over 500 lbs of cocooned Wilson WITT loudspeakers onto the floor of my garage. Like the Thiel CS7s I had parted with just a few weeks earlier, the WITTs came packed in solid, heavy wooden crates. The pained expressions on Doug'n'David's faces indicated that it was time for me to start reviewing minimonitors! The unpacking went more smoothly than I expected, but this is clearly a pair of loudspeakers that demand to be delivered, uncrated, and set up by a dealer.
We all know it's impossible to reproduce live music. An obvious statement, no doubt, and one that holds every audiophile hostage to the never-ending search. As a musician, I find the situation especially frustrating. The constant reminder of live <I>vs</I> reproduced makes living with an audio system a serious compromise, regardless of price or quality. About three and a half years ago, however, I reviewed a product which I felt, and still feel, offers the first real glimpse of that impossible dream: the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/506">B&W 801 Matrix Monitor</A> (footnote 1). Although it wasn't perfect, I found this speaker provided more musical honesty than anything I had heard before. In this respect, it established a new standard by which others would be judged.
We all know that vinyl collectors like the sound and feel of a 12" LP, but reader DAB suspects many of you horde sealed copies of LPs to sell later. Do you ever buy LPs that you never open to sell later?
Some people might wonder what it is about me and <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/turntables/708rega/">the Rega P3</a>. Why would I simply settle on the old Rega when there are so many other similarly priced turntables out there?
Calling anything “IMPORTANT,” particularly a record, often sucks the life out of it and dooms it to a kind of overly academic hell to be debated by talking heads and those that “were there.”
My home, which overlooks a dairy farm, is easy to see from a mile away, invisible from the end of its own driveway. Elevation: 1345'. Population: 3.