LATEST ADDITIONS

The promise of happiness is elusive. Is it found in the 10-hour workday? Maybe it’s spotted sunbathing on the Portuguese shoreline. Or is it found in a wider soundstage? Sartre teaches, "In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing." So if your actions define who you are, and if you love what you do, then will you find content?

In March 2008, when I bought my PSB Alpha B1 loudspeakers, I decided that I should also buy PSB's matching SubSeries 1 subwoofer (footnote 1). It seems odd to me now that I would have considered the $449 subwoofer a necessary complement to speakers that sold for $279/pair. What was I thinking? Was I rolling in money? Certainly not. Was I merely young and fancy free? Yes and no. Was I sex-starved? Quite possibly.

This business biography of hi-fi pioneer Gilbert Briggs and his company, Wharfedale, is an exhaustively researched labor of love on the part of his grand-nephew David Briggs. In a sense, the book is a prequel to Ken Kessler's KEF: 50 Years of Innovation in Sound (2011). That's because KEF's founder, Raymond Cooke, worked for Gilbert Briggs at Wharfedale from the early 1950s through mid-1961. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

We are saddened to learn that Franco Serblin, founder of Italian loudspeaker manufacturer Sonus Faber, passed away on Easter Sunday, March 31, at 73. Larry Greenhill interviewed Franco Serblin in June 1992 for Stereophile. We will add more details as they become available.

In a recent Stereophile.com news item, John Marks informed readers about free online music production classes now offered from the esteemed Berklee College of Music. Seems like JM himself is taking up this opportunity. In this video assigment, JM shares his explanation of the ORTF microphone placement technique for stereo recording.

It was announced Friday March 29 that guitar manufacturer Gibson was to buy a majority stake in Japanese company TEAC, which manufactures audio components sold under the TEAC, Tascam, and Esoteric brandnames. From the press release: "Gibson has entered into an agreement, signed today, with Phoenix Capital in which two investment funds operated by Phoenix Capital have agreed to sell to Gibson all the shares they own in TEAC Corporation, or 157,447,000 shares, (54.4% of the issued and outstanding shares), at a price agreed between the parties of 31 JPY per share. . ."

It was the strangest thing. In the fall of 2008 I was comparing Ayre Acoustics' then-new KX-R line preamplifier with no preamplifier at all—I was feeding the power amplifier directly with the output of the Logitech Transporter D/A processor. (Levels were matched for the comparisons, of course, made possible by the fact that the Transporter has a digital-domain volume control.) Being a rational being, I knew that the active circuitry of a preamplifier, as well as the extra socketry and cables, would be less transparent to the audio signal than a single piece of wire. I wanted to determine by how much the Ayre preamp fell short of that standard.