LATEST ADDITIONS

I'm currently attending GuangZhou Hi-Fi 2006 in GuangZhou, China (you can read my <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/china2006//index.html">China Hi-Fi Tour 2006 blog</A>). The show is a fantastic audio event and everywhere I look, I see products I want&mdash;some very similar to mainstream US brands and some exceedingly strange and different. But the <I>audiophiles</I> are familiar: Show me a guy who lights up in the glow of a 300B and I'll show you one of <I>my</I> chosen people.

There's been a lot of speculation that the music business as we know it cannot survive the download era, now that artists can sell their music direct to fans. Do you think the major labels will survive the transition from discs to downloads?

For many years I have used three sets of headphones, all from Grado Laboratories: the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/796grado">Reference RS-1</A> ($695), the SR-125 ($125), and the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/532">SR-60</A&gt; ($60). I've always favored Grado headphones because the minimal-resonance design philosophy that I feel is responsible for the uncolored midrange of their moving-iron cartridges extends throughout their headphone range as well. Recently, however, I've achieved a new perspective regarding the SR-125 'phones that I felt would be of interest to <I>Stereophile</I> readers.

For headphone listeners, this is truly a golden age&mdash;we have multiple choices at many different price levels. During the course of this review, I had as many as five headphone amplifiers (and, in several cases, multiple power supplies) set up for comparison. Yet many people don't understand why we might want a headphone amp in the first place.

<I>What,</I> I hear you asking, <I>is an integrated drive?</I> The MID is part of McCormack's much lauded "Micro" series (see my review of their Micro Line Drive in Vol.18 No.6), which are designed to offer the same dedication to quality as McCormack's full-size components, but at a lower price (and in a smaller package). The MID was initially the Micro Headphone Drive, sporting two &#189;" stereo phone-jacks on the front panel, a two-position input switch, and a volume control. The rear boasted two inputs and an output (controlled by the volume pot). It was designed to be a high-quality headphone amp and a minimalist preamp. In this configuration, I ran into it at the 1995 WCES where&mdash;almost as a gag&mdash;Steve McCormack had made up a few &#189;" stereo phone-plug to 5-way binding post connectors. He could, he explained, run small speakers from the headphone outputs. There was a serious purpose behind the joke, of course. Showing that the MHD could drive speakers spoke volumes for its ability to drive headphones.

Barque & Consonance's Opera Consonance M15 mates a 15" woofer with a unique multicell horn tweeter. Sensitivity is 98dB (!) and frequency range is rate at 30Hz&ndash;20kHz. The tweeter handles everything above 500Hz. Price would be around $10,000/pair USD, not including distribution costs.

I was listening to Barque & Consonance's Opera Audio Consonance M-15 loudspeakers when Lino Faragi introduced himself. "I'm that crazy European guy who opened up a hi-fi shop in China&mdash;the first non-Asian to do high-end here," he said, handing me a card for Sound & Vision in Shanghai. "We do things a little differently. Come see us."