LATEST ADDITIONS

If the name Audio Eden conjures mental images of an unspoiled, verdant music paradise where your troubles don’t exist, then Ontario retailer Audio Eden’s room lived up to its name.

Bluebird Music, a distributor of high-performance audio products, has announced the release of the Weiss DAC501 MK2 and DAC502 MK2 for the U.S. and Canadian markets. Both models are built by Weiss Engineering and represent the latest in the company’s nearly four-decade pursuit of high-fidelity sound reproduction.

Is audio reviewing a futile pursuit? As much as we reviewers may strive, through subjective observation and objective measurement, to accurately describe how a component looks, sounds, and performs, we frequently find words and numbers inadequate to communicate the mysteries that abound in the transcendent realm of music. How can we fully share what we feel when a component allows us to experience, sometimes afresh, often in a new way, sounds that elicit joy, sorrow, terror, or more subtle emotions? How do we encapsulate in words and measurements the sonic equivalent of the wide-eyed wonder that shines through a baby's eyes as she discovers something new?

Such emotions—hence such questions—can arise when we move from one music server to another, or even between different software running on the same server. They are particularly intense in the case of this review of the Ideon Absolute Stream meta edition (2024) ($24,000) and its optional add-on, the Ideon Alpha Wave LAN Optimizer ($6900), considering that the review lacks measurements.