Listening
Have I mentioned what a pleasure it is to be able to buy more than a relative handful of titles on SACD? During the format's first few years, the commercial SACD repertoire was limited mostly to labels owned by Sony Music, and most of the…
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The Luxman D-06u was much faster at loading CDs and SACDs than is my Sony, which approaches that task with all the smartness of a New York State DMV clerk during a work stoppage. From placing a disc in the Luxman's motorized drawer—the smoothest and most solid such device of my experience—to hearing music never took more than 12 seconds.
In 1989, I bought my second pair of Rogers LS3/5a's from a guy on Staten Island who had them hooked up to a Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amplifier. After playing the speakers for me, he began removing his zip-cord speaker cables and paused to show me how, at the amplifier end, his red-plastic Pomona Electronics banana plugs had partially melted from the A1's heat. We both laughed.
After it first appeared in 1985, the A1 quickly became famous for its hot top plate. The top plate got as hot as it did because it was used as a heatsink for the output transistors, which were biased highly…
The finest soup I ever tasted was served in Kamakura City, Japan, in 1992. After climbing a mountain to a shrine that held a lock of Buddha's hair, I descended to Kamakura and walked to its Great Bronze Buddha. By the time I had taken my fill of the image's 730-year-old wonders and the countless picture-taking tourists at its base—a mild precursor to "the world is a backdrop for my ego" snappers of the smartphone age—I noticed that my stomach was growling.
Exhausted, I walked back into town and descended stairs into a conveniently located corner restaurant. I had to eat fast because my…
EMT JSD 6 Moving Coil Cartridge
My goal for this column was not to compare the not-free EMT tonearm to the not-very-expensive Jelco or Schick arms. Those comparisons would be interesting but difficult to make. As of this writing, I have only listened to the 912-HI tonearm with EMT's own JSD 6 cartridge, and I have only listened to that cartridge with this tonearm. So I cannot separate the sonic impact of the tonearm from that of the cartridge. If the creek don't rise, in Dreams to come, I will report how a few of my favorite cartridges responded to the 912-HI. In this column, I'll…
Photos: Kenny Johnson Photography
"Give me the seduction, give me the pleasure," Ron Sutherland was nearly shouting into the phone. "I want to turn off the analytical mind and just enjoy myself!"
Sutherland speaks in the chipper Midwestern cadences of a comic character actor from the 1940s, sort of like a grown-up Eddie Bracken from The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and I'd never heard him sound so excited. He was talking about his new phono stage, the Dos Locos, the first product he's designed collaboratively, having enlisted a group of audiophile friends who listened to and…
When Pass Labs is mentioned, it's natural to think of its founder, iconic engineer Nelson Pass. But Nelson heads a team of engineers at the California company: Their XP-30 preamplifier, which I enthusiastically reviewed in April 2013, was designed by Wayne Colburn; and the subject of this review, the HPA-1 headphone amplifier, is the first Pass Labs product designed by Jam Somasundram, former director of engineering for Cary Audio. Somasundram joined Pass Labs in July 2013; he spent a year working on the HPA-1, which was shown at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, but not…
The brightness I noted with the WATT/Puppies was nowhere in evidence here. On Behold Man, another selection on this sampler, this time of solo chorus (from Testament, RR-49CD), the overall balance was excellent, with no sense of brightness or leanness but rather compellingly natural warmth and acoustic space. The latter is particularly notable throughout this CD, and the Hafler did an especially good job of reproducing it. Likewise in the portrayal of depth, where the front-to-back layers of the chorus were clearly audible.
Nor did the 9500 shortchange other types of program material.…
One night, while listening to the LIO, I hauled out a wonderful recording by pianist Raymond Lewenthal, who wails as he plays and conducts Funeral March for a Papagallo and Other Grotesqueries of Alkan (LP, Columbia Masterworks M30234). On most any system, this LP will let the piano sound quite realistic. But forget sound—this disc is all about Raymond Lewenthal's messianic and fitfully inspired pianism. He doesn't just play the keys and pedals—he engages the whole instrument. I played this record with (don't laugh) a $75 Shure SC35C moving-magnet cartridge on a $2100 Abis SA-1.2 tonearm (I…
When I reviewed the Mark Levinson No.536 monoblock, I said that its sound quality was second to none. However, its stratospheric price of $30,000/pair unnerved me—only seven of the 35 top-rated solid-state power amplifiers listed in the April 2017 edition of Stereophile's "Recommended Components" cost more, and a similar number (not the same models) deliver more power into 8 ohms. "But don't despair," I wrote—"Mark Levinson has just released a less expensive version of the No.536: the dual-mono, 250Wpc No.534 stereo amp ($20,000)." I requested a review sample of the No.534, to see if it…
The amplifier has three operating states: Off, via the rear-panel power switch; On, by pressing the front-panel button, which turns on all audio circuits and activates all outputs; and Standby, an energy-saving mode. Within Standby are three more options, selectable via the amplifier's internal webpage or RS-232 connector: Green, the factory default, is the lowest-power standby mode; it disables the Ethernet and RS-232 inputs, but permits wake-up via the trigger inputs. Power Save, a moderate energy-saving standby mode, permits wake-up via RS-232 or Ethernet. Normal mutes all outputs, but…