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Records 2 Live 4 2023 Page 6

Robert Schryer

Dean Wareham: I Have Nothing To Say To The Mayor of L.A.
Dean Wareham, vocals, guitar, composer; Roger Brogan, drums; Jason Quever, guitar, organ, cello, drums; Britta Phillips, bass, vocals, keyboards.
Double Feature CDDBL0018 (CD). 2021. Jason Quever, prod.; Scott Hull, eng.

Dean Wareham, a New Zealand native turned NYC-based American, co-founded indie pop bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. Wareham has delivered a gem of indie folk with this, his third solo release. There's something about the mood in this recording that I find incandescent and…

JA's First Report from the 2018 RMAF

I was hosting a seminar on the Friday afternoon of the show—"50 Years of Being an Audiophile," where I examined how my system and tastes in music and sound quality has evolved since I bought my first audio components five decades ago—and was starting my drive home to Brooklyn Sunday morning, which left me Saturday to visit exhibitors' rooms. My apologies, therefore, to those I wasn't able to get to.

I started my tour in the ground-floor room next to the restaurant hosted by Colorado dealer ListenUp. There I did a double-take—wasn't that a JBL Century L100 three-way loudspeaker, with its…

Rogue Audio Stereo 100 power amplifier

When I began writing for Stereophile, I dreaded doing comparisons. They were stressful and tedious—and what if I got them wrong? But I quickly learned: Not only do readers enjoy comparisons, they need them. How else might they imagine the relative merits of the component under consideration? Once I realized this, I began acquiring a range of reference amplifiers, such as the low-power Pass Laboratories XA25 and PrimaLuna ProLogue Premium, the high-power Bel Canto Design e.One REF600M monoblocks, and the single-ended Line Magnetic LM-518 IA. I also collected a range of affordable, popular…

MBL Noble Line N11 line preamplifier MBL Chief Engineer Jürgen Reis

Sidebar 1: MBL Chief Engineer Jürgen Reis

Jürgen Reis, 59, whom John Atkinson respectfully describes as "an engineer's engineer," joined MBL in 1982, when the company was three years old. After improving the original MBL preamp, he designed MBL's first three-way speaker system, the MBL 101, in 1986.

As Reis's work continued, he found time to sing baritone/bass in the award-winning Hanover Choir, play guitar in a rock band, and serve as a recording engineer. With time for only one serious recording project per year, he currently records the superb ensemble Concerto Köln for…

Bowers & Wilkins Diamond Series 804 D4 loudspeaker Page 2

The music source was my Roon Nucleus+ feeding audio data over my network to an MBL N31 CD player/DAC, which was connected to a pair of Parasound Halo JC 1+ monoblocks. The speakers were single-wired with AudioQuest Robin Hood cable.

Listening
Listening to the dual-mono pink noise track on the Editor's Choice CD (Stereophile STPH016-2), I noticed too much treble energy. I followed the advice in the manual to toe-in the speakers so that they point at a location just in front of the listening position. This reduced the treble excess sufficiently that I could now hear that the pink…

iFi ZEN CAN headphone amplifier & ZEN DAC Signature V2 D/A processor Jim Austin March 2022

Jim Austin reviewed the iFi ZEN DAC Signature V2 and ZEN CAN Signature March 2022 (Vol.45 No.3):

When she reviewed two iFi ZEN Signature combos for our January 2022 issue—the ZEN DAC Signature V2 with two versions of the ZEN CAN Signature headphone amplifier, which include a custom-EQ curve for particular headphones—Julie Mullins was impressed by their performance. She wrote, "the ZEN Signature sets delivered highly resolved, clean, pristine, dynamic sound. The amplifiers are powerful. Backgrounds black as a new-moon nighttime sky brought musical details to the foreground." But there was…

Analog Corner #265: Notes from the Road (Hi-Fi Shows & MQA)

At audio events held by the Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society, I'm usually called on to speechify about one thing or another, or to roast an honoree at one of the Society's December Galas. But at the spring 2017 Los Angeles Audio Show, Bob Levi, the Society's president, quipped, "This is one awards dinner where you won't have to entertain—so relax and enjoy!"

After the dinner and the speechifying, and my roast of Chad Kassem, founder of Analogue Productions, Acoustic Sounds, Quality Record Pressing, and Blue Heaven Studios. came the show's 23 Alfie awards, in three categories—…

PS Audio PerfectWave DirectStream MK2 D/A processor Page 2

As I was writing this review, it had been 8 years since Stereophile reviewer and gifted pianist Bob Reina passed away from an aggressive esophageal cancer. I had used the DirectStream MK1 to play several of the recordings I had made of Bob's free-jazz ensemble Attention Screen back in theday.

The DirectStream MK2's maximum output level is 2.3dB higher than that of the original DirectStream, so after switching to the new DAC, I matched its level to within 0.3dB with the 1kHz warble tone at –20dBFS on Stereophile's Editor's Choice CD (STPH016-2). Playing Attention Screen's Live at…

Magico V3 loudspeaker Page 2

I have been playing a lot of late a CD-R that recording engineer Tony Faulkner had pressed into my hands at the 2004 Heathrow Show. It was a live recording he had just done of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Owain Arwel Hughes, performing Gustav Holst's The Planets (subsequently released on CD as Warner Classics 61991). The disc had gotten lost among the many piles in my listening room, and I uncovered it while tidying up in mid-December to get the room presentable for Alon Wolf, who was visiting to help set up the V3s. The Planets has long been a favorite of mine, but what…

The Great Debate...and Then Some

"Some say it dates back to 1927, when Gramophone magazine's editor thundered that electrical reproduction was a step backward in sound quality," said the promotional copy for Home Entertainment 2005's opening-day event, "The Great Debate: Subjectivism on Trial." It continued: "But whenever it started, the Great Debate between 'subjectivists,' who hear differences among audio components, and 'objectivists,' who tend to ascribe such differences to the listeners' overheated imaginations, rages just as strongly in the 21st century as it did in the 20th." On April 29 at the Manhattan Hilton,…