LATEST ADDITIONS

Before last year, I had no more than a professional interest in the products of Wilson Audio Specialties. But before last year I hadn't experienced <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/artdudleylistening/listening_86">Wilson's Sophia Series 2</A> loudspeaker ($16,700/pair)&#151;which, like the wines I tend to order when my wife and I go out to dinner, is the second-cheapest item on their menu. Within weeks of the Sophias' arrival, respect had turned to rapture, like to love, and an entirely new appreciation for Wilson Audio was mine (footnote 1).

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Reader Wayne Lowry notes that most of the high-end systems he hears sound overly bright: "the louder I play them, the more they hurt my ears." Do you think most high-end audio equipment is too bright-sounding?

Yesterday morning, John Atkinson and I drove out to Mikey Fremer’s place to perform a set of test measurements on the <a href="http://www.magico.net/magicoq/index.php">Magico Q5</a> (review scheduled for our November issue). While JA set up his gear for the in-room measurements, I got to listen to music. Mikey was my personal DJ. He played some sultry Julie London, some angry Gil Scott-Heron, and some soothing Nat “King” Cole. All three, thanks to the outstanding recordings and thanks to the outstanding system, sounded very much <i>alive</i>.

I’ve been following Jenny Scheinman for a few years now: her frequent Tuesday night sets at Barbes, a small Brooklyn bar and sometimes-jazzclub not far from my house; her side gigs with the likes of Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, and Ben Allison at various clubs in Manhattan; her wry CDs, most notably <I>12 Songs</I>.

In <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/hirezplayers/marantz_sa-11s2_reference_sacdc… review</A> in the February 2009 issue of Marantz's SA-11S2 SACD/CD player ($3599.99), I said that "buying [an SACD] player in 2009 necessitates an act of faith similar to the one turntable buyers faced back in 1992." The negative reaction to this from the besieged SACD community was as intense as it was irrational. If they're angry with <I>me</I>, I can only imagine how they feel about Stanley Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy, who presented a white paper at a 2001 Audio Engineering Society convention that claimed to prove that SACD doesn't qualify as a high-fidelity format (footnote 1). How many figurative bags of flaming poop did they leave at <I>their</I> front doors?

Over the years that I've been reviewing hi-fi, I've had my share of loudspeakers that drew comments from everyone who visited during the audition period. Some of those comments were about the speakers' appearance&#151;most often about their size&#151;and some were about how good they sounded. Vivid's G1Giya loudspeaker ($65,000/pair), its narrow-baffled, swirling cochlear shape molded from fiber-reinforced composite, elicited more comments of both types than has any other speaker I've reviewed.