LATEST ADDITIONS

"If you tried to give rock'n'roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.'"—John Lennon

Space Soul Rock in Austin. . .

Can high-resolution audio become "The New Cool?"

"Crafted out of aluminum and coated with nitrocellulose lacquer, this truly fascinating object is the ultimate analog medium."

The ratings given components included in this listing are based entirely on performance—ie, accuracy of reproduction—and are biased to an extent by our feeling that things added to reproduced sound (eg, jitter, distortion, colorations of various kinds) are of more concern to the musically oriented listener than are things subtracted from the sound (eg, deep bass or extreme treble). On the other hand, components markedly deficient in one or more respects are downrated to the extent that their deficiencies interfere with the full realization of the program material.

The recently-released Audirvana Plus 3 has become the first desktop music player for MacOS to include an integrated MQA Core decoder. To quote the press release, issued jointly by London-based MQA and Paris-based Audirvana, Audirvana's MQA Core decoder "enables the first origami 'unfold' and also authenticates the file using a blue or green light to confirm that the sound is identical to that of the source material."