One of the things most frequently spoken about here is the absence of musical events during show hours, which dedicated attendees have always used to re-calibrate their ears, rest their aching feet, and reconnect with audio buddies who have wandered off on their own (footnote 1). Fortunately, the blues lunch featuring Honeyboy Edwards, courtesy of Acoustic…
search
Saturday is always the crunch day at the Home Entertainment Show. There are more people in the halls, more bodies in the rooms, and more noise everywhere—and it's wonderful. People here really speak our language: audiogeek spoken here.
During the second part of my first day at T.H.E. Show, I paid a visit to the Hotel Irvine's Woodbridge Room—a poetic name that gelled with the quality of the gear on display. The companies featured were here from Japan—Concert Fidelity Inc. based in Nagano, and Maxonic/SRC Inc. in Tokyo. On offer was the Concert Fidelity CF-i300B Integrated Amplifier ($10,000) and the Maxonic TW7000B Field Excitation Speaker System, with cabling from the Maxonic Miyabi line (pricing not provided). As the name implies, the Concert Fidelity integrated utilizes 300B tubes, and puts out 9Wpc. Maxonic also offers…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I used Stereophile's loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 "As We See It") to measure the MSB Diamond DAC IV; for some tests, I also used my vintage Audio Precision System One Dual Domain.
The MSB combination offers a bewildering number of playback options, with three different flavors of digital data input (USB, AES/EBU and S/PDIF, and MSB Network), four reconstruction filters, two choices of upsampling, and both balanced and unbalanced outputs. I started my testing, therefore, with the more…
Back in high-end audio's golden days—for the purposes of this story, the mid- to late 1980s—my audio store, Audio Ecstasy, had a service tech named Tom Hewitt. Were he still with us (and I wish he were), Tom would appreciate the radical case design of the MSB Analog DAC. Tom loved not only to fix things, but to see what happened when things were violently stressed. He tested the limits of component construction.
Tiring of dropping receivers off our building's roof or ramming TVs (tied to the back of a pickup truck) into the shop's brick wall, Tom soon discovered that one of our customers…
But as we saw earlier, with filters there's always a trade-off—and in this case it's a gradual rolloff in frequency response that starts at 12–15kHz at low sampling rates (44.1 or 48kHz). And so T+A provides another Bézier filter: an interpolator plus an infinite impulse response (IIR) correction stage that combines a very good impulse response (not as good as the pure Bézier, though) with a very accurate and flat frequency response at high frequencies. The filter rolloff is less of a problem at higher sampling rates. Again, pick your poison.
In all cases, T+A says it uses 56-bit data…
With the clock ticking, and three floors to go, I made a hard choice. Skip virtually everything on the lobby level, do what I can of the rest, and promise with all my heart and soul that if I am privileged to return to AXPONA presents Audio Con Chicago in 2016, I will start on Friday on the lobby and lower levels. In doing so, I will remind myself that even though this year, I heeded requests from several manufacturers who pleaded that their rooms would not be up to snuff on Friday, and thus started on the top, that if they're on the lower levels next year and they're not ready for prime time…