Audacious Audio

Stereophile strives to distribute the wealth equally. Did that get your attention? What the statement refers to, in terminology devoid of dollar signs, is that Stereophile attempts to review products from different companies rather than repeatedly focus on products from a single company.

Wilson Audio of Provo, Utah, is executing a multiyear revision of their product line, resulting mostly in a series of "remastered" redesigns that carry in their names the designation "V." The latest V model is the Sabrina V, which replaces the prior SabrinaX. "V" refers to Wilson's proprietary V-Material first used in the Chronosonic XVX.

Frederich Nietzsche distinguished between two approaches to culture: The Apollonian, which is characterized by order and rationality, and Dionysian, which is about chaos, intoxication, and vitality. Apollo was the god of Music, Art, Light, and Knowledge, and to Nietzsche, the Apollonian impulse was the main source of beauty.

Way back in the age when Stereophile's print magazine was the size of a theater playbill, common wisdom declared that the tube preamp was the ideal complement to solid state amplification.

It takes audacity for a company that already builds one of the finest DACs on the planet, which is already expensive, to set out to build one that's so much better that it warrants an extra digit in the model number and a much higher price tag. But then CH Precision has never lacked audacity.

"Panel speakers that do bass? Sign me up!" That was my reaction when I first heard a pair of Diptyque Reference loudspeakers, at AXPONA 2023. The Reference is a 6'-tall, French planar magnetic speaker whose designers, Gilles Douziech and Eric Poix, make no secret of their love for Magnepan, the Minnesota company famed for its dipole panels. The French duo has improved on Magnepan's pioneering technology by addressing the number-one shortcoming of such designs: a lack of low-frequency extension.

In ancient times, when I first ventured beyond playing files stored on a USB stick or NAS to streaming from Tidal and Qobuz, I ran a USB cable between a MacBook Pro and my DAC. For playback software, I alternated between Amarra, Audirvana, and—sometimes with a dCS DAC—dCS Mosaic.