LATEST ADDITIONS

Recently, I received an email from Editor Jim Austin. "Larry, do you still use your Day Sequerra FM Reference tuner1 to listen to FM radio?" he asked.

"Jim, yes, I still listen to FM classical music in the Bay area. Why?"

Someone once asked me, "If I buy your $90,000, 25W amplifier, what will I get that I am not getting with my $2000, 200W amplifier?" My answer was simple: "Goosebumps, tears, and smirking." Great, well-tuned audio systems, at all price levels, give their owners less of the annoying and distracting stuff and more of the exciting and engaging stuff. Great systems offer more opportunities for smirking pridefully while listening to great recordings.

Talk about a Scarlet Letter. The term class-D amplification, which describes PS Audio's new M1200 monoblocks, exists only because another amplifier innovation had already parked in the "C" space. Soon after appearing in high-performance audio gear, class-D became synonymous with "digital amplification" in part because, like early CDs, many listeners found the sound glary, hard, and unpleasant. Besides, class-D is related to "pulse width modulation" and requires a low-pass filter to block high-frequency pulses—that sure sounds digital. But they're not (see Bruno Putzeys sidebar).

Cavitation revolutionized record cleaning more than a decade ago, when Reiner Gläss's Audiodesksysteme introduced its original fully automatic machine. Mr. Gläss's innovative machine, which automatically spun the record in ultrasonically cavitated water, then dried it with fans, at first was plagued with reliability issues, and because it is sealed, it was not easy to repair.