LATEST ADDITIONS

If you read much promotional literature for recently introduced high-quality equipment, you'll notice a common theme emerging: balanced connection. Balanced inputs and outputs are becoming a must for any audio equipment that has any claim to quality. The word itself has promotional value, suggesting moral superiority over the long-established "unbalanced" connection (for the purpose of this discussion, I will call this "normal"). What's my problem with this? Simply this: The High End could be paying dangerous, costly lip service to the received wisdom that balanced operation is the goal for an audio system.

<B>HILLIARD ENSEMBLE/JAN GARBAREK: <I>Officium</I></B><BR> Medieval & Renaissance Chant & Polyphony by Morales, Perotin, Dufay, de La Rue, Anon.<BR> The Hilliard Ensemble, vocals; Jan Garbarek, soprano & tenor saxes<BR> ECM New Series 78118-21525-2 (CD only). Manfred Eicher, prod.; Peter Laenger, eng. DDD. TT: 77:41

<I>More than 20 years ago, when the turntable was considered a perfectly neutral component in the playback chain, Ivor Tiefenbrun single-handedly demonstrated to the world that the turntable was not only an important part of a hi-fi system, but perhaps the </I>most<I> important part. That radical idea was the basis for the legendary Linn Sondek LP12 turntable, the product that launched Linn, and which is still in production 22 years later.</I>

During a recent visit to Canada's National Research Council, I noticed stuck to the wall of the prototype IEC listening room a page of results from one of Floyd Toole's seminal papers on the blind testing of loudspeakers. The scoring system was the one that Floyd developed, and that we adopted for <I>Stereophile</I>'s continuing series of blind tests. "0" represents the worst sound that could possibly exist, "10" the perfection of live sound&mdash;a telephone, for example, rates a "2." The speakers in Floyd's test pretty much covered the range of possible performance, yet their normalized scoring spread, from the worst to the best, was just 1.9 points.

MAHLER: Symphony 1, "Blumine"
James Judd, Florida Philharmonic Orchestra
Harmonia Mundi USA 907118 (CD only). Peter McGrath, eng.; Paul F. Witt, prod.; Robina Young, exec. prod. DDD. TT: 64:15

<B>LYNN ARRIALE: <I>The Eyes Have It</I></B><BR> Lynn Arriale, piano; Jay Anderson, bass; Steve Davis, drums<BR>DMP CD-502 (CD only). Lynn Arriale, Tom Jung, prods.; Tom Jung, eng. DDD. TT: 62:22

In this space last January, I enthused about the sound of linear 20-bit digital recordings which, I felt, preserve the quality of a live microphone feed. "I have heard the future of audio—and it's digital!" I proclaimed, which led at least a couple of readers to assume I had gone deaf. Putting to one side the question of my hearing acuity, 20-bit technology has been rapidly adopted in the professional world as the standard for mastering. The remaining debate concerns how to best preserve what those 20 bits offer once they've been squeezed down to the 16 that CD can store. Sony's Super Bit Mapping algorithm and Harmonia Mundi Acustica's redithering device have been joined by new black boxes from Apogee Electronics, Lexicon, and Meridian; it appears likely that, in next to no time at all, all CD releases will be offering close to 20-bit resolution—at least in the upper midrange, where the ear is most sensitive.