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Forty years ago, as I was starting out on my audio journey, I railed against the flashy mainstream audio gear of the day. To me less was more, and I tried to convince my friends that my small, austere British-made audio rig, including what my friends jokingly called my Lynn Swanndek turntable (after the Steelers wide receiver), really did sound much better than their big silvery Japanese stacks loaded up with shiny knobs, switches, and meters. Audio was all about the sound after all, and I wasn't interested in some dazzling visual display that had nothing to do with what I was hearing. I gravitated toward gear that wasn't flashy or fancy looking, feeling that meant that the effort and expense to create it went where it counted most, to the parts that made it sound great.

This paragraph from Linear Tube Audio's website description of their new Aero DAC sets the tone for the story I'm about to tell. "After trying various options, we chose the Analog Devices AD1865 R2R DAC chip, which is sometimes called the 'vinyl DAC,' for its organic sound. It is a non-oversampling DAC, with no digital filters. The AD1865 is much-loved by audiophiles and is used by at least one hi-fi company in a flagship DAC costing over $150,000."

Check the forums and you find that the AD1865 chip is also a heavy DIY favorite. Home brewers are attracted to this discontinued, "obsolete" 18-bit chip for its easy implementation and unprocessed, music-friendly sound.

Loudspeaker company GoldenEar Technology was founded in 2010 by audio industry veteran Sandy Gross after he left Definitive Technology. With a design team based in Canada that included Martyn Miller, who is still GoldenEar's senior acoustic engineer, GoldenEar produced a series of relatively affordable speakers that garnered favorable reviews in Stereophile. The most recent of these was the BRX (Bookshelf Reference X) standmount, which I reviewed in September 2020 and have been using as one of my reference loudspeakers since.

The BRX was the last GoldenEar speaker to be produced under Sandy Gross's aegis; in January 2020, the company was acquired by The Quest Group, the parent company of cable company AudioQuest. At the 2023 High End Munich show, Quest announced a new GoldenEar speaker, the floorstanding T66, said to be the first model in a new series.

Some 30 years ago, vinyl records seemed to be heading in the direction of the 8-track tape, toward becoming an obsolete format. As everyone knows, vinyl rebounded and has so far avoided that fate (but see this month's As We See It about the status of the Compact Disc). An international association aims to keep it that way.

The Vinyl Alliance was formed in 2019 "to strengthen awareness and the image of vinyl records worldwide," according to the organization's website. The VA is a membership organization with some 40 institutional members including vinyl producers, record companies (including all three major labels), music resellers, record-press makers, pressing plants, and turntable and cartridge manufacturers.

The hi-fi receiver has been many different things. Early examples, like the Harman Kardon "Stereo Festival" TA-230 from 1958 (said by modern-day Harman/Samsung to be the first stereo receiver), featured separate FM and AM monophonic tuners that could assign a speaker to each if you wanted to listen to what was then a fad: stereo broadcasts over two stations (left channel over FM, right over AM, for instance). Standardized FM stereo broadcasting began in 1961, and by then, receivers had evolved into large, complex, nearly complete stereo systems; an example of that was the Fisher 800.

It might be nice if the receiver can connect to a modern TV, which will have either TosLink or HDMI-ARC output, or both. For those of us who still own a bunch of CDs, we might as well include a robust DAC—and maybe even a built-in CD transport. Throw in FM analog and digital tuners, and voilà, you have the R 2500 R, the "21st Century Receiver" from T+A Elektroakustik of Herford, Germany, southwest of Hanover.

Danny Elfman: Percussion Concerto, Wunderkammer
Colin Currie, percussion; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, cond.
Sony Classical 906443 (reviewed as 24/96 WAV). 2024. Danny Elfman, prod.; Peter Cobbin, Kirsty Whalley, Dennis Sands, Patricia Sullivan, engs.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****

It's time to go out on a limb. Are Danny Elfman's Percussion Concerto and the other works on his new album "great music"? Should this classical music, from the former lead singer and songwriter of new wave band Oingo Boingo—who composed film scores for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Spider-Man, and whose music introduces Desperate Housewives and The Simpsons—be in the same conversation with Albéniz, Scriabin, Ligeti, Glass, Gluck, Brahms, and Beethoven, whose work appears on our other Recording of the Month candidate, Yuja Wang's Vienna Recital?

When the CD is gone, and it will be soon, we'll miss it. New CD releases are winding down (footnote 1). In the classical world, the era of big, bargain-priced boxes of CDs—a somewhat recent development—is ending because, after a long, slow descent, retail sales have fallen off a cliff in the past year or so. In pop and rock, if you discover a new band you like, you may or may not be able to buy a CD. Perhaps they'll self-publish a few to sell at concerts; there's a better chance they'll have LPs, assuming they can get time at a vinyl-mastering studio and a pressing plant, both of which are booked to the max. CDs, though, are an afterthought if they're even that.

Vinyl records will likely stay around indefinitely as a collector's artifact, but new CDs are fading fast. This is momentous. CD will be remembered as the last mainstream physical music format. Its passing marks the death of physical music media.