When I walked into the VK Music room, I was jealous and embarrassed. I was jealous, because obviously VK Music's Victor Kung was doing something I admire; I was simultaneously embarrassed that I had never heard of his British Columbia-based operation. Not only that, I was jealous because his TU-8600…
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Throughout the 1990s, whilst I imported Audio Note products from the UK and Japan (now called Kondo), I longed to simplify my life and add more Zen to my lifestyle: I just wanted to import high quality tube-amp kits from Asia and Europe. But alas, the Great Force had other plans for me.
For final tuning, I played Stevie Nicks's smoky rendition of "Silver Springs," from Fleetwood Mac's The Dance (CD, Reprise 46702-2). Surprisingly, her voice was thicker, with a chestier timbre, than when played through the Quads alone. Resetting the crossover-filter corner frequencies to 40Hz didn't help.
I turned to SVS's Merlin. When the setup advisor asked for my satellite speakers, I typed in "Quad ESL-989." It recommended running the Quads full range and setting the SB13-Ultra's low-pass corner frequency to 40Hz, 24dB/octave.
Voilà! Nicks's voice lost the coloration, and…
I'm deep into audio power amplifiers because they remind me of race car engines. Both power sources are wildly inefficient, converting only a small percentage of their stored energy into work while dissipating the rest as heat and vibration. Mainly though, I love how race car engines sound. How they shake the air. Just like amps and speakers.
Audio-frequency power amplifiers take a small input signal—usually less than 1V—apply it to an input impedance of (typically) no less than 10k ohms, and make this tiny eye-blink of power (0.0001W) into a waveform that's many times more powerful,…
Photo by Will Byington
2001's Couples in Trouble, which he released on his own Boondoggle Records, was offputtingly eclectic. Even as The Washington Post's Geoffrey Himes hailed the record as Fulks's "most intimate, most ambitious work," Himes all but warned off potential buyers. "Before the record ends, the singer will try his hand at new-wave pop, art song, show tunes, troubadour folk, synth noise and honky-tonk." Sorry, too rich to digest. Fulks set out on a multi-album journey through classic hard country with 2001's ironically titled 13 Hillbilly Giants; its perverse conceit is…
Integrated Amplifiers & Receivers
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Ayre Acoustics AX-5 Twenty: $12,950
In 2013, AD described the original Ayre AX-5—a $9950 integrated amplifier built around a recently rediscovered configuration of bipolar transistors known as the "diamond" circuit—as "one of the three best, most musical, most human-sounding solid-state amps I've ever heard." Then, in 2015, Ayre debuted a new version, the AX-5 Twenty—a nod to the company's 20th anniversary—promising even better sound. The AX-5 Twenty is built into the same foursquare aluminum case as the AX-5, and is controlled by…
I have always been a dyed-in-the-wool vinyl fan, committed to the superiority of analog over current 44kHz/16-bit CD technology. Nevertheless, I have been surprised at how greatly the sound of CD has improved over the past 10 years. By 1994, digital had gotten much closer to analog than I had ever expected, which was a good thing, as 1994 also saw the disappearance of the LP as a medium for obtaining new releases of mainstream recordings. But over the last two years, I've noticed some interesting phenomena: More turntables, tonearms, and cartridges started to become available, at least in…
It's a beautiful drive, considering you're on a freeway. You take I-25 north out of Albuquerque, Sandia Peak to your right and the Jemez Caldera and Mount Taylor dimly visible in the distance to your left. As you broach La Bajada hill south of Santa Fe, the Sangre de Cristo range—the "Blood of Christ Mountains" described by Paul Simon in "Hearts & Bones"—appears before your windshield. You take the Old Pecos Trail exit to the City Different, but before you reach town you bear to the left, then take another left opposite St. Vincent Hospital. There, in a cul-de-sac, you peer up at the…
My normal practice in seeking out contenders for Affordable Speaker Nirvana is to pursue speakers I stumble across at our Home Entertainment shows, and to keep tabs on new designs from manufacturers whose wares have impressed me in the past. This time, however, editor John Atkinson called me out of the blue: "How would you like to review the Amphion Helium2 loudspeaker? It's the entry-level speaker in a Scandinavian speaker line distributed by Stirling Trayle of Quartet Marketing."
I recalled covering Amphion's attractive, floorstanding Creon2 in my HE2002 show report in…
High-grade aluminum is precision-cut on a CNC milling machine to form the one-piece midrange-and-tweeter baffle, the cabinet interlocking mechanism, the back-plate, the removable crossover bays inside the mid-section, and the specially designed adjustable floor spikes.
I found the review samples' bird's-eye-maple veneer exquisite. Every inch of the Evidence shows attention to detail, from the specially molded center section's front baffle to the setup tools packed with each loudspeaker pair. Fit'n'finish are first-rate; the elegant cabinets are solidly constructed, and their overall…
Sidebar 4: JA Listens to the SFD-2
Given RH's enthusiastic report on the sound of the Sonic Frontiers, I felt that I should also give it a listen. My system consisted of B&W Silver Signature speakers driven by a pair of Mark Levinson No.20.6 monoblock power amplifiers; the preamplifier was first the Sonic Frontiers SFL-2, then the remote-controlled Mark Levinson No.38S. The digital source was a Mark Levinson No.31 transport connected to the processor via either Madrigal AES/EBU cable or ASM Labs' Mamba ST-optical cable. For reference purposes, I too had the original SFD-2 and the…