LATEST ADDITIONS

In February 2009, I reviewed Bryston Ltd.'s first CD player, the $2695 BCD-1, and was very impressed by what I heard. The BDA-1 ($1995) is the Canadian company's first standalone DAC. It's slim, only 2.75" high, with the engraved company name, model number, and infrared sensor grouped at the extreme left of a front panel of polished aluminum. Farther to the right are two columns of four LEDs each that comprise the sample-rate indicator, which identifies the selected input's signal frequency and whether the BDA-1 has locked to it. Closer to the center is the Upsample control, which governs the conversion of the incoming digital signal synchronously to 192kHz or 176.4kHz. The Upsample LED turns green for 192kHz, red for 176.4kHz. Digital sources are selected by pressing one of eight pushbuttons just right of center: two TosLink, four S/PDIF (coaxial), one AES/EBU XLR, and one USB 1.1, the last accepting only signals with sample rates at or below 48kHz. An LED above each pushbutton lights green for an incoming PCM datastreams and red for other types, including multichannel Dolby Digital streams.

The guitarist John Fahey was born on February 28, 1939, and died just days before what would have been his 62nd birthday, on February 22, 2001. Like so many other beautiful things that continue to have enormous impact on my life, Fahey’s music was introduced to me by <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/clouds_taste_metallic/">Miche…;. The album was 1997’s <i>City of Refuge</i>. We were in our second year at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in the second year of our relationship. Michelle had claimed the album from our campus radio station and brought it back to our dorm room and played it for me.

Though the recordings sell in <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR20100… numbers</A>, the real thing continues to thrive. Do you attend classical music concerts?

The March 2010 issue of <i>Stereophile</i> is now on newsstands. Open it up and you’ll see that Steve Guttenberg has rediscovered his faith in vinyl. Hooray! What did it for him? A new turntable: the VPI Classic. “Coming back to vinyl,” Steve writes, “I now see that digital’s primary fault is that it encourages passive listening.”

Last night at <a href="http://lepoissonrouge.com/">Le Poisson Rouge</a>,<br>
<a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/four_tet_there_is_love_in_you… Hebden</a> made all the kids<br>
slither and groove.

Among the maladies to which music lovers are especially susceptible, hearing damage caused by prolonged exposure to loud sounds is perhaps the most pernicious. When you're young, you normally don't think about the consequences of cranking up the volume, but if you do that routinely, you are sure to suffer some form of hearing deficit in your later&#151;or, in some cases, not so later&#151;years.

Playback Designs was founded less than three years ago. However, with the release in 2008 of its MPS-5 Music Playback System&#151;a slim, full-featured SACD/CD player and DAC that costs $15,000 and is built in the US&#151;the company has since established itself as a significant player in high-performance digital audio.