LATEST ADDITIONS

Although I've never tried one, I think "lifestyle" audio systems are a bit of a joke. My in-laws' decade-old Bose Wave Radio sounds good for what it is, although its obvious flaws—boomy, undefined lower mids masquerading as bass, a frustrating lack of sonic and musical resolution, etc.—become grating fairly quickly. These days, there are far more accomplished and expensive lifestyle systems out there, but because I haven't tried them I won't comment on them, except to say that I'm not really interested.

Last week, Paul Messenger and I represented Stereophile at a Marantz press conference announcing the New Reference Series: the SA-10 SACD player/DAC and the PM-10 amplifier. The conference was held at D+M's European Headquarters located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Josh Bizar of Music Direct, Andy Quint of The Absolute Sound, and I were the only Americans present at this session. (And naturally, the most severely jetlagged.) We were joined by nearly two-dozen international audio journalists from a handful of countries.

"Our production line was stepping on its own toes," said Boulder Amplifiers' Rich Maez, Director of Sales and Marketing, as he welcomed me into the company's new, massive 23,000 sq. ft. manufacturing and testing plant in Louisville, CO. The move to a huge, brand-new building on 3 acres of land outside Boulder, in an area devoted to light industry, was greeted with sighs of relief by a team that had formerly found itself squeezed into an increasingly over-packed 10,000 sq. ft. facility.

If speakers were cars, the Infinity IRS Beta and B&W 801 Matrix would represent the luxury end of the mass market, with perhaps the Celestion SL700, Quad ESL-63, and MartinLogan Sequel II analogous to rather hairy, temperamental sports cars—the Porsche 911, for example. But most people don't buy Porsches, or even Lincoln Town Cars; they buy Hyundai Excels and Ford Escorts. In the same way, when the car is garaged for the night, they don't sit down in front of IRS Betas; in all likelihood they listen to their records with a compact two-way design. If competently designed, a small two-way can give a great deal of musical satisfaction, and, to take a current hobbyhorse of mine out for a trot, if a designer can't produce an at least competent two-way loudspeaker, he or she has no business trying to design larger, more ambitious models—there's nowhere to hide your lack of talent if all you have to play with is a tweeter, a woofer, a rectangular enclosure, and a handful of crossover components.

Thursday, December 1, 6–9pm: Audioville (4340 Rue Saint-Denis, Montréal, Quebec, Canada) will host a Digital Music Seminar featuring the new AudioQuest NightOwl headphones (above); Saturday December 3, from 1–5pm will be a special day at Fidelis High End Audio (460 Amherst Street, Nashua, NH 03063); while also on Saturday, December 3, with the door opening at 4pm, JS Audio (4919 St. Elmo Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814) is holding a Holiday Open House.

My passion for listening to music through headphones is fueled by the enhanced sense of intimacy and extra feeling of connectedness I experience in rediscovering recordings I already love. You know the old audiophile cliché: It's like hearing my record collection for the first time. High-quality headphones provide a sharper-than-box-speaker lens that lets me experience lyrics, melodies, and instrumental textures more close-up and magnified.

For the past eight months, my headphone of choice at Stereophile's New York office has been a pair of AudioQuest Nighthawks. That's eight hours a day, five days a week, for approximately 32 weeks. Not eternity, but we've spent a good chunk of quality time together. The overall setup is comprised of an Apple MacBook Pro (usually streaming Tidal, Spotify, or Amarra for Tidal), an AudioQuest Jitterbug, an AudioQuest DragonFly Red, and said NightHawks. I suppose it's safe to say that my ears tend to jibe well with AudioQuest products.