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Sennheiser Drops HDB 630 Wireless Headphones

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News

The July 2015 Issue is on Newsstands Now

Stereophile Staff Jun 15, 2015

Bel Canto's extraordinary Black amplification system is featured on the cover. Combining state-of-the-art class-D monoblocks with an all-digital preamplifier, the Black sounds and measures as good as it can get. At a price, of coursebut at the other end of the price spectrum, we review Creek's Evolution 100A integrated amplifier, as complete in its way as the Black is in its. These are not your father's amplifiers.

Robert Baird

Blood and Freedom

Robert Baird Jun 12, 2015

Fred Kaplan

Ornette Coleman (1930–2015)

Fred Kaplan Jun 12, 2015

Ornette Coleman, the great alto saxophonist and composer, died yesterday at the age of 85. His great jazz quartet of the late 1950s and early '60swith Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins (sometimes alternating with Ed Blackwell) on drumsrevolutionized jazz, shifting it away from chord changes to structures built more around melody, rhythm, and harmonic suggestions not confined by set chord changes. And while some of his followers may have descended into noisy chaos, Ornette himself rarely went that route and, in fact, in the '90s, stepped up to a new level of lyricism, culminating with his 2006 album Sound Grammar, which won that year's Pulitzer Prize for music.

Digital Processor Reviews Headphone Reviews

Aurender Flow D/A headphone amplifier

John Atkinson Jun 11, 2015

Aurender was a name new to me when I encountered the company at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, where they displayed a range of music servers designed in California and manufactured in South Korea. But what caught my attention in Aurender's suite was their Flow portable D/A headphone amplifier ($1295). This handsome, battery-powered device, housed in a machined aluminum case about twice the size of a pack of playing cards, offers optical S/PDIF and USB 2.0/3.0 input ports and a single ¼" stereo headphone jack. Two features distinguish the Flow from the pack: Its USB input can be used with iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Android smartphone sources, and it can accept an mSATA drive (not included in price) of up to 1TB capacity for internal storage of audio files. Visually, the Flow's distinguishing feature is its round LCD display, which stands proud of the faceplate; the bezel encircling the display acts as a velocity-sensitive volume control operating in 0.5dB steps.

J. Gordon Holt Solid State Preamp Reviews

Quad 34 preamplifier

J. Gordon Holt Jun 11, 2015

The Model 34 preamplifier is the component from English manufacturer Quad that will disenchant perfectionists, partly because of its obvious pandering to connoisseurs of old and sometimes lousy-sounding records, and partly because of its sound.

This solid-state design is supplied with a built-in moving-magnet cartridge preamplifier, and a moving-coil preamp is included with it for (easy) installation by the user if desired. (Remove two screws, pull out the old module, plug in the new one and replace the screws. The job takes about 3 minutes.) The MC preamp supplied is for 20 microvolt-output cartridgescontrary to the instruction booklet's statement that the supplied one is the 100µV version. Modules having a rated input level of 100 or 400µV are available as extra-cost options.

Fred Kaplan

Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage

Fred Kaplan Jun 10, 2015

Herbie Hancock's 1965 quintet album Maiden Voyage holds a firm place as one of the great jazz records of that transformative decade, and a new vinyl edition on Music Matters Jazzthe LA-based house renowned for its audiophile LP reissues of Blue Note titles, and only Blue Note titlessounds finer than it has on any pressing in 50 years.

As We See It

RFI, CB, and the FCC

Jack Hannold Jun 09, 2015

Editor's Note: We are reprinting this 38 year-old "As We See It" essay because if you substitute the words "WiFi" and "cellphone" for "Citizen's Band" and "CB Radio," you will realize that not much has changed in the decades since, with our audio systems still awash in a bath of RFI.John Atkinson

Although Citizen's Band radio may hold little interest for perfectionist audiophiles, there is a good chance that it may intrude upon our activities in some disastrous ways if we, and the audio industry in general, sit back and ignore what has been going on behind the scenes in Washington, DC.

Interviews

John Ulrick

John Atkinson Jun 09, 2015

It was with regret that I heard John Ulrick had passed away on May 20, 2015 due to complications from cancer. With Arnie Nudell and Cary Christie, John was one of the founders of loudspeaker manufacturer Infinity, a company that, with Audio Research, Magnepan, Mark Levinson, and Threshold, epitomized the nascent High End that emerged in the early 1970s. After leaving Infinity, John Ulrick started Spectron, to manufacture class-D amplifiers.

Just by chance, I met with the John Ulrick, in Los Angeles in late 1987, when he was doing some design consultancy on a switch-mode power amplifier to be used with the Sumo Samson subwoofer. As I had my Walkman Pro with me, I took the opportunity to tape some background from John about the birth of Infinity and about switching/pulse-width-modulated/class-D amplifiersboy, can this man talk about switching amplifiers! The natural kickoff question was, How did Infinity get going?

News

Robert Lighton Audio Showroom Open in NYC

Art Dudley Jun 08, 2015

Earlier this year I pried myself from my upstate-New York home long enough to visit Robert Lighton Audio: a beautifully decorated suite on the 12th floor of 37 West 20th Street in Manhattan's Chelsea district, in which an Audio Note Ongaku amplifier shares space with a Suzanne Guiguichon armoire, and from which the view of the Empire State Building is stunning.

Audacious Audio Tube Preamp Reviews

Valve Amplification Company Signature SE preamplifier

Robert J. Reina Jun 05, 2015

For me, the highlights of any audio show are finding a room with great sound and visiting it often throughout the show, to relax and absorb a wide range of great music. At the NY Audio Show in April 2012 in New York City, it was the room occupied by the Valve Amplification Company. There, I fell in love with the sound coming through the Signature Mk IIa line-stage preamplifier, and remembered that while I'd heard many VAC products at audio shows over the past two decades, and had enjoyed the sound every time, I'd never had a VAC product in my house. I requested a review sample.