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In recent months, Stereophile's "Letters" column has been filled with complaints about the equipment we choose to review. "Too rich for my pocketbook" is the universal sentiment. This puzzles me, considering that Stereophile does review many "affordable" components. In part, I think this reaction is due to the high profile invariably associated with very expensive gear. Although we did put both speakers on our cover, one review of a Wilson Grand SLAMM or a JMlab Grand Utopia seems to outweigh 10 reviews of more realistically priced products. Our writers love to cover the cutting edge of…
It was eight years ago that I first met Aalt Jouk van den Hul. I was visiting Ortofon in Denmark, and, with a group of hi-fi journalists from all over Europe, was traveling by bus to visit the cartridge-production facility in the far south of that country. Bus journeys are not my ideal way of passing time; naturally I gravitated to the rear of the bus, where bottles of Tuborg were making their presence felt. One journalist, however—a pixieish fellow hailing from The Low Countries—resisted the blandishments of the opened bottles. Producing a sheath of black-and-white glossies from his…
van den Hul: That's a big limitation of these small companies. On the other hand, if you are serious about analog, I would say buy records from these small companies.
Atkinson: Do you think the digital process will be improved significantly?
van den Hul: It cannot be very much improved. It can only come up to the level it was intended to have at the beginning. The promotional activity was extremely good, but the technology lagged behind, and the technology has to catch up with what is was supposed to be. We have had 14-bit single sampling, 14-bit double sampling, 14-bit with…
van den Hul: I wouldn't say that. That's too rude. But they have more or less put this number two, or number three or four, on their list of priorities, instead of number one. Maybe the cosmetics were more important than having a good modulator.
Three things are very important in cartridge design. I would say first to have very low tracking force, so that you can retrieve on the next play what you retrieved the previous time. Second, to have very high channel separation. And third, to have enough output.
Atkinson: When it comes to channel separation, many papers have been…
My best wire, MC Silver, has three different layers of Teflon film around the wire and runs flat up to 22GHz! And it's just a multi-strand wire with a single line in the center in a braiding. People working with this wire have said this is the very best they have ever auditioned. This is a new standard in audio. It is very expensive to make but on the other hand I am quite sure that when you get this wire, in 10 years you will not have a better wire. It will keep its quality over all that time.
One of the things I think associated with good quality is to use a balanced, rather than a…
There are also a lot of mechanical reasons why products change—the bending of metals, for example. Producing wires for conductors is a very deteriorating process, particularly when you chemically coat copper with silver. In the process, you bend the cable, stretch it, bend it, stretch it again—30 or 40 times—so the wire is worn out even before it's silver-coated. That's one of the reasons why silver-coated copper sounds harsh. There's also the chemical deterioration under the silver which starts to break down the structure of the copper before even the slightest coating of silver is done.…
van den Hul: My experience with the European press has been that there was a certain skepticism about the carbon-fiber cables because it's a new material. After reviewers listened to the product, however, they were extremely happy with the quality. There is more openness there toward products using a different approach, a different idea.
You will find very few journalists declaring that there is no difference. We're all human beings—we all have two ears, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, and two arms. But are we all the same? No. We are all blessed with creativity, but everyone uses his…
Question: What is it that almost every audiophile takes for granted, yet has more effect on the sound of his system than does any single component in that system? Answer: His listening room.
It is probably safe to say that 95% of the systems in audiophile homes are being degraded by a bad listening environment. Sound waves reflect from walls, floors, and ceilings, reaching our ears milliseconds after the direct sounds from the speakers and smearing those sounds. Echoes reverberate back and forth between parallel reflective surfaces, adding more smear and coloring the sound with spurious…
(This is the most common recommendation; other authorities recommend having the 100% at the speaker end and the 50% at the listening end. I prefer the room to be completely deadened, with the addition of an electronic reverb device like the Benchmark ARU to add acoustical space to the listening area. Play the absorption game by ear. An excess of deadening is generally better than a deficiency, but any error is easily reversible if you don't glue things in place.)
What about size? Well, nonparallel room boundaries will yield many different dimensions, but the average dimensions—that is,…
Many audiophiles will look back on the summer of 1982 as the year the creeping cruds invaded their hallowed halls of hi-fi. In the Conrad Hilton hotel, where most of the high-end contingent gathered at the June 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, one exhibitor was featuring a videodisc presentation with wide-range audio and insisting that this was the way of the future. And at least three others had managed to smuggle in digital tape recorders (all Sony PCM-F1s), and were giving many CES visitors their first taste of real, unadulterated, digital reproduction.
This was most unsettling to those…