LATEST ADDITIONS

Last May, Jack Oclee-Brown, KEF's Head of Acoustics, visited John Atkinson's listening room to drop off and set up the KEF Reference 5 loudspeakers ($19,000/pair). (JA's review appears in the October Stereophile, which will hit newsstands and mailboxes later this week.) In this video, they discuss Jack's origins and the challenges of speaker design, as well as the genesis of the Reference 5.

Bill Berry and His Ellington All-Stars: For Duke
Works by Duke Ellington
Bill Berry, cornet; Ray Brown, bass; Frankie Capp, drums; Scott Hamilton, tenor sax; Nat Pierce, piano; Marshal Royal, alto sax; Britt Woodman, trombone.
M&K Real-Time RT-101 (direct-to-disc LP).

This is to-date the best direct-to-disc recording I have heard. For once I can't complain about the high end being shrill or hard. The balances are excellent and the performances superior, with each member of the group getting his chance to show off. Marshal Royal's saxophone solos must be heard to be believed, Everyone present is obviously having a good time making music, which is the way it always ought to be but often isn't.

The Genesis 500 ($650) is the baby brother of Monster Cable's top-of-the-line Genesis 1000 cartridge. It is almost identical in physical appearance, differing only in its use of green body trim (the 1000 sports red pinstripes). All of the functional differences appear to be in the stylus and cantilever. The cantilever of the 500 is a hollow sapphire rod tightly attached to an inner aluminum tube (the 1000 has a diamond-coated boron tube cantilever). Its stylus is a 6µm x 35µm line-contact (3µm x 60µm for the 1000). Monster claims a stylus life in excess of 600 hours for the Genesis 500, more than 1000 hours for its higher-priced sibling.

The embrace of MQA by audio companies and labels has widened. At last weekend's IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, MQA announced that its technology will be embedded in LG's new, globally distributed V30 flagship smartphone. In addition, two Sony Walkmans, the WM-ZX300 and WM-A40, will become equipped for MQA music playback. Worldwide music streaming platform Deezer is also planning to go the MQA route, with Bluesound, LG, Onkyo, Moon by Simaudio, and Sony amongst its partners.

Warner's 5-CD box set, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: The Complete 78 rpm Recordings 1946–1952 is a vocal lover's dream. Filled with recordings made when the soprano was between 30 and 37 years of age—she was born December 9, 1915—this bargain bonanza confirms that Schwarzkopf's oft-brilliant, sometimes outré interpretations of art song and opera were an essential part of her artistic personality from the get-go.

In football there's a saying to describe an unexpected outcome: "That why they play the games." The recorded music equivalent might be "That's why you have to listen to the records."

It's time to fulfill my promise to write about Playback Designs' Sonoma Syrah music server and Sonoma Merlot DAC. It all began when I asked Playback's founder and CEO, engineer Andreas Koch, when he plans to produce a multichannel digital-to-analog converter—a question I've put to so many other manufacturers. He said that he already had a multichannel system on the drawing board, and not just a DAC. Our e-mail exchange culminated in his announcement of the Playback Designs USB-XIII Digital Interface, to be used between a USB source component and as many as three DACs via PLink, Playback's proprietary fiber-optic connection.