LATEST ADDITIONS

This receiver includes a rather respectable little tuner, almost comparable to the Dyna FM-5 in performance, a 15Wpc power amplifier of passable quality, and a preamplifier section that in some ways gives some of the costliest preamps a run for their money.

If you don't live in a difficult receiving area or are trying to receive long-distance FM, the tuner should satisfy any perfectionist. It is far superior to the FM transmission quality in most US cities anyway. The power amplifier is better than any we have previously found driving the dinky little speakers in most compact systems, but it has neither the power nor the other attributes to replace any of the amplifiers currently in favor with perfectionists.

There's a new audiophile-quality vinyl reissue endeavor on the scene: Intervention Records (IR). Dedicated to reissuing recordings that are "entirely new to the vinyl reissue market, particularly titles that never saw a vinyl release at all or only saw very limited release," Intervention Records' titles are sourced from the best available sources, primarily analog master tapes, and are mastered in the analog domain by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio.

The sixth annual California Audio Show kicks off this Friday, August 14, 10am, at the Westin Hotel in Millbrae. In a lovely location facing the water and within walking distance of several restaurants, audiophiles and the equally curious will enjoy sound in 29 active exhibit rooms, a "Headmasters" room with 7 exhibits, and 5 more exhibits in the hallway...

Call me a hopeless romantic but I could not get “Penny Lane” out of my head as I sat in the back of a black cab whizzing across a remarkably deserted London early one morning a couple weeks ago. “On the corner is a banker with a motorcar…” I was on a pilgrimage. More like THE pilgrimage. The one every serious fan of twentieth century music needs to make at least once. Out to St. John’s Wood and Abbey Road Studios.

We've worked out a special deal for readers to celebrate the new Chesky You're Surrounded release.

From now until September 7, 2015, readers of this website will get a 25% discount on the new 24-bit high resolution You're Surrounded album and/or anything in Chesky's hi-res catalog on HDTracks.com.

[This offer has expired.]

If anyone can be said to be the guru of the transmission line, that would have to be Irving M. "Bud" Fried. He has been promoting the design for years now, first with the made-in-England IMF designs, later with the designs of Fried Products, made right here in the US of A. He has long been convinced of the basic superiority of the design, and still uses it in his top-of-the-line systems. But true transmission lines are invariably big, heavy, hard to build, and, for all of those reasons, expensive. Essentially, they involve a long, convoluted, heavily damped tunnel behind the bass driver which channels the back wave to the outside world. The length and cross-sectional area of the tunnel are of some importance, although the technical basis for the transmission line, as applied to a loudspeaker enclosure, has never been firmly nailed down. Certainly there is no mathematical model for the transmission line as complete as that developed over the past two decades for the sealed or ported box (footnote 1).

But Bud Fried has clung to the transmission line, for all of its complexities. In order to bring at least some of its touted advantages to a lower price point, he had to come up with a variation which would work in a smaller enclosure. That variation was the "line tunnel," which, according to Fried, originated in an early-1970s Ferrograph (a British company specializing in tape recorders) monitor which was later adapted by IMF. Basically it consists of a short (compared with a transmission line) duct from the inside to the outside of the heavily damped enclosure. The duct is designed with approximately the same cross-sectional area as the loudspeaker cone.

Friday, August 7, 5–9pm, and Saturday, August 8, 10am–7pm: Yamaha and Fillion Électronique will participate in the OSM Classical Spree Music Festival, to be held at Place des Arts (1600 Saint-Urbain Street, Montreal).