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A room with a view

Among the finest aspects of the site selected for the Chester Group’s New York Audio Show was the view from the New York Palace hotel. As you can see from this glimpse through the window at the exhibit of Well Rounded Sound (to whom I’ll return shortly), one side of the Palace looks out on the neo-gothic Cathedral of St. Patrick, dwarfed by other architectural marvels in this concrete canyon: serious sights for serious listening.
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Meet the Press

The audiophile press seemed a surprisingly patient bunch. After following the incredibly well indicated signs placed by the Chester Group to the Fourth Floor of the New York Palace, reporters and photographers waited subserviently in a four-person line to receive our press badges. At the counter, Art Dudley, columnist and Editor-at-Large for Stereophile, and Jeff Dorgay, publisher at Tone Audio, chummed it up.
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NY Audio Show 2013: Getting There From Brooklyn

It had already been a long week at Stereophile. I trucked through three thirteen-hour workdays plugging in code for the Recommended Components iPad app and had my first dentist appointment in five years. Holes had been burned through my eyes and scraped through my teeth. Luckily, my ears were still there dangling. But the rain, the rain, THE RAIN! I could have done without the rain this morning.
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Markus Popp: Calidostópia!

Electronic composer Markus Popp (Oval) may be best known for his terse, angular, and rhythmically complex micro-compositions, but he seems increasingly interested in making full-fledged songs.

With Calidostópia!, recently released as a download, he’s combined the glitchy pointillism of previous releases, such as 2010’s fascinating O (which I used as a test disc in my “Follow-Up” review of Simaudio’s versatile i3.3 integrated amplifier), with the voices of seven South American singers: Agustín Albrieu of Argentina; Andrés Gualdrón of Columbia; Maité Gadea of Uruguay; Hana Kobayashi of Venezuela; and Dandara Modesto, Aiace Felix, and Emilia Suto of Brazil.

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High Fidelity Takes Manhattan

From Tsunehisa Kimura's Toshi Wa Sawayakana Asa Wo Mukaeru (The City Welcomes a Fresh Morning)

As Jason Victor Serinus reported, the New York Audio Show will take place this Friday through Sunday at the Palace Hotel (455 Madison Avenue, at 50th Street) and will host some 250 high-performance audio brands and several interesting seminars.

But the New York Audio Show is not the only audio-related event to take place in Manhattan this weekend. Two major NYC dealers, Lyric Hi-Fi & Video and Stereo Exchange, will hold their own special events, separate from the NYAS. Both events are free to the public and will feature product demonstrations, discounted pricing on demo equipment, and ample time for Q&A with manufacturer representatives.

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The Fifth Element #78

Reading the November 2012 Stereophile, my eye was caught by John Atkinson's very enthusiastic review (he bought the review sample) of Ayre Acoustics' new QA-9 analog-to-digital converter. Over and above the intrinsic interest of the QA-9's claimed flat response down to about 1Hz, and that it is a cutting-edge ADC from a maker of consumer rather than professional audio gear, I had just been engaged by early-music scholar and organist Beverly Jerold to produce and engineer a recording of historically informed performances of Baroque organ music by Buxtehude (b. 1637), Clérambault (b. 1676), J.S. Bach (b. 1685), and Domenico Scarlatti (b. 1685). The recording venue was the Auditorium of the Third Meeting House of the First Baptist Church in America, in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Autonomic Controls Mirage MMS-5A media server

I bought a Slim Devices Squeezebox network player in the spring of 2006 and my life changed. Having audio files on a server and being able to play them through my high-end rig via the Squeezebox's S/PDIF output liberated my music from the tyranny of a physical medium. As I wrote in my review, "physical discs seem so 20th century!" After Wes Phillips reviewed the Squeezebox's big brother, the Transporter, in February 2007, I bought the review sample and lived happily ever after in the world of bits rather than atoms—at least until the summer of 2010, when Slim Devices' new owner, Logitech, brought out the Squeezebox Touch. The Touch did everything the Transporter did, with a full-color display, at one-eighth the price!
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Yves Beauvais

"While the selection and fine tuning of exhilarating-sounding vintage audio equipment is an exciting, often life-long search, let's not forget it's ultimately the music that matters—mankind's mysterious mastery of making air move in esthetically & emotionally thrilling ways. Most importantly, remember to ask yourself the age-old question: Can I dance to it?"
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Listening #124

Beethoven understood the pathos of the gap between idea and realization, and the sense of strain put on the listener's imagination is essential.—Charles Rosen

Bass, like sex, is something most young men desire in excess: To the novice, quantity trumps quality, and as long as he can hear from his playback system the deepest sounds of an orchestral bass drum or five-string electric bass (low string tuned to B-0 or C-1), he is completely satisfied.

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