Instead of Armor All, recommends Meguiar's #40 Vinyl and Rubber Conditioner for his car-speaker surrounds. The material contains no silicone gels, he points out, and leaves a medium rather than a glossy shine, with no greasy residue. Other…
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In his first e-mail to "Fine Tunes," Rafael Teodoro (RBT@wolfenet.com) addressed a subject that Mark Gdovin, that faithful frequenter of the Stereophile soapbox, had already brought up. Mark had gone so far as to give readers sage advice from his brother, a materials engineer, regarding the dangers of applying Armor All to speaker cones and surrounds.
Just when you thought it was safe to put green paint around the edges of your CDs without ridicule, there's yet another CD tweak that's sure to bring howls of laughter from the skeptics: cryogenically freezing CDs. They won't be laughing for long, however, when they hear for themselves the sonic results of this process.
Ed Meitner, designer of the Museatex line of electronics, has discovered that cryogenically freezing a CD changes the physical structure of polycarbonate, the plastic material from which CDs are made. The result is reportedly an audible improvement in sound quality. In…
Ed Meitner contends that several mechanisms are at work that degrade the HF signal picked up by the photodetector. One phenomenon is distortion of the aluminum layer by the laser beam's heat. Even though the beam is very low-power—about half a milliwatt—it is focused on such a small area (1.5µm) that the aluminum molecules bend, causing the aluminum layer to flex. This introduces jitter in the HF signal as well as noise in the focus signal.
This phenomenon has reportedly been measured by painting black bars on a CD's top surface (the label side) and looking at various signals. The bar…
While we're on the subject of CD tweaks, I mentioned in my article in Vol.13 No.5 ("CD: Jitter, Errors, and Magic") that a Japanese company called HiBright was making CDs with a proprietary material called Amorphous Poly Olefin (APO) that reportedly offers better sound than conventional polycarbonate. At the time of that writing, I had not heard discs made with this material. However, I now have two copies each of two different discs (footnote 5), one made with polycarbonate and the other with APO, but both pressed from the same stamper.
Interestingly, the disc made from APO was smoother…
FM Antennae
Editor's Note: No indoor antenna can compete with a good roof or mast-mounted outdoor antenna, but because apartment dwellers often don't have a choice, we list the following indoor models that we have found to work well: AudioPrism 8500 ($499, Vol.14 No.6), AudioPrism 7500 ($299, Vol.12 No.5), Magnum Dynalab 205 FM Booster ($350, Vol.10 No.6), RadioShack amplified indoor FM antenna ($29.99, Vol.19 No.11), RadioShack 15-2163 FM antenna (Vol.27 No.7), and Fanfare FM-2G ($99, Vol.20 No.12). Outdoor antennae we have reviewed and recommended are the Antenna Performance Specialties…
Pick an expletive—one you would normally use to express deep intellectual frustration—but don't vocalize it. Hold it in reserve for a few minutes, letting it simmer to concentrate its intensity. I'll tell you when to let rip.
In an October 2004 "Industry Update" (p.29), Paul Messenger reported on a paper presented recently to the Institute of Acoustics in the UK on the subject of loudspeaker bass response (footnote 1). The paper begins with the observation that the subjective bass performance of different speaker designs can vary considerably, and concludes that phase behavior (group…
This does not mean, as is sometimes inferred, that the measurement becomes unreliable below 167Hz—the problems begin much higher in frequency than that. What it does mean is that the frequency range is divided up into slices 167Hz wide, and any features of the loudspeaker's response that occur within one slice will be agglomerated in the measurement. That's of little consequence at a frequency of, say, 10kHz. But below 1kHz, this resolution amounts to a mere six frequency slices—obviously not enough to reveal useful detail.
Figs.1–3 (originally published in the English magazine Hi-Fi…
Hamstrung initially by conventional thinking, I began to conceive mechanical contrivances to hoist speakers (and the measurement microphone) 4.5m off the floor, so as to place them equidistant from the hall's floor and ceiling. That way, I should be able to open out the time window, for a 1m measurement distance, to around 23ms—much better than the 6ms or so I achieve at home, to be sure, but, as fig.2 clearly shows, still not enough. As the prospect of finding a room of significantly larger dimensions seemed remote, my thoughts turned to the various means of post-processing that have been…
September 1997 saw the 35th anniversary of Stereophile magazine, founded by J. Gordon Holt back in 1962. If any interview needs no introduction, this is it. My interview with Gordon was conducted around the kitchen table in Gordon's Boulder, Colorado home over a couple of cold beers. It seemed appropriate to start at the very beginning...
J. Gordon Holt: I don't remember when that was.
J. Gordon Holt: I don't remember when that was.
Steven Stone: [laughs] You don't remember when you were born?
Holt: It was 1930.
Stone: And your parents were...
Holt: Older than I was...
Stone: I would hope.
Holt: Justin…
Stone: And you were also a cartoonist at that time?
Holt: That was in 1954, just after I finished college. I took a cartooning course in New York City on how to draw, present your work to editors, make contacts---that sort of thing---and began selling cartoons to magazines. I did it for about a year, just before I went on staff with High Fidelity.
Holt: That was in 1954, just after I finished college. I took a cartooning course in New York City on how to draw, present your work to editors, make contacts---that sort of thing---and began selling cartoons to magazines. I did it for about a year, just before I went on staff with High Fidelity.
Stone: Did you still make recordings after joining High Fidelity?
Holt: Yeah, except that there weren't any orchestras in Great Barrington. I did weird-type recordings because I didn't have anything else to do---like putting a microphone…