Stereophile's Products of 2006
Product of the Year: Continuum Audio Labs Caliburn turntable with Cobra tonearm and Castellon stand (review)
Joint Budget Products of the Year:
Rega Apollo CD player (review)
Revel Concerta F12 loudspeaker (review)
Slim Devices Squeezebox WiFi D/A processor (review)
Joint Loudspeakers:
Quad ESL-2805
Sonus Faber Amati anniversario (review)
Vandersteen Quatro (review)
Joint Amplification Components:
Conrad-Johnson ACT2 preamplifier (review)
Halcro dm88 monoblock power amplifier (review…
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Previous Awards, 1992–2006:
In common with the mood of our times, there seems to be an increasing amount of bad temper in the High End. There are more people around who, in Jonathan Scull's timeless phrase, have a "level of audiophile rage very close to the surface." Witness, for example, the "cancel my subscription" letter from Professor Daniel H. Wiegand in this issue: he obviously feels a line has been crossed.
Professor Wiegand was pushed over the edge by Jack English's recent article on system tweaks (May 1995, p.69). But why the anger? That tweaks in general can have an effect is a given. It also seems to be a…
In this month's "Letters," Donald Bisbee raises the subject of the government's proposed reduction in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), I agree with Mr. Bisbee that commercial radio broadcasting in the US is an intellectual desert. Music is narrowcast, with listeners' tastes bound into predigested categories. There is no depth or analysis to radio news programs, other than discussions by populist commentators who, no matter what you may think of their politics, usurp the ability of their audiences to think for themselves. As a regular listener to NPR and watcher of…
Veljo Tormis: Forgotten Peoples
Tõnu Kaljuste, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
ECM New Series 1459/60 (434 275-2, 2 CDs only). Paul Hillier, prod.; Peter Laenger, eng. DDD. TT: 2:06:01
Tõnu Kaljuste, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
ECM New Series 1459/60 (434 275-2, 2 CDs only). Paul Hillier, prod.; Peter Laenger, eng. DDD. TT: 2:06:01
With the introduction of the written word, traditional oral cultures find themselves waking from the cycling steady-state of dreamtime into history's linearity and a new myth: progress. The songs, myths, and creation tales that before literacy had been seamlessly embedded in daily life, passed down orally and by cultural osmosis, now become art, aesthetic artifacts framed by time. A spiritual…
You know what's the first thing they teach you in dental school? Don't ever say "Oops!" Even if you stick one of those hooked teeth scrapers through the patient's cheek, you don't say "Oops!" "Don't move!"? Yes. "Oops!"? No. That's the big day-one lesson—and given the cost of medical malpractice insurance today, a damn good one.
I never went to dental school, but I used to be friendly with a bunch of dental students. They always had the best parties: Everyone would gather around the nitrous oxide canister and laugh their asses off until they'd drop from oxygen deprivation. (CES is kind…
Both cartridges use a highly polished Ogura PA line-contact diamond stylus. In the Clavis, the diamond's short, square shank is precision mounted and glued into the cantilever via a laser-cut square hole claimed to be the world's smallest. (It measures just 60 microns by 60 microns.) The result is said to be the lowest-mass tip in the world. The AudioQuest's solid-boron cantilever has a "slice"—a channel made in its tip—and the shank is inserted and glued there. Because of the mounting technique, the Fe5's shank is somewhat longer than that of the Clavis.
The stylus profile is not as…
The original Clavis and the 7000 nsx used long pole-pieces and a very strong magnet to generate a reasonably high output signal with extremely low distortion. The 7000 Fe5 uses a similar arrangement. The Clavis DC, however, offers a radical departure from that scheme in that there are no pole-pieces. There is a similarly shaped structure to anchor the cantilever assembly, but it does not function as a magnetic flux transmitter. Instead, two powerful disc magnets are threaded on the cantilever assembly, with one replacing the back "pole-piece" and one the front "pole-piece." The gap is…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: low-output moving-coil cartridge featuring a boron cantilever; low-mass Ogura PA line-contact stylus; "five nines" FPS (Functionally Perfect Silver) silver coils; "five nines" iron core. Internal impedance: 2.5 ohms. Recommended vertical tracking force (VTF): 1.8–1.85 grams. Compliance: 9cu. Weight: not specified. Channel separation: not specified. Frequency response: not specified. Output: 0.4mV (5cm/s, 45° peak). Recommended load: 200 ohms–47k ohms.
Serial number of unit reviewed: F7432.
Price: $2550 (1996); no longer available (2007).…
Sidebar 2: Mikey's System
To compare cartridges I used two different tonearms on the VPI TNT Mk.3: the Graham 1.5t unipivot, and the Rockport Capella air-bearing linear tracker, which is silicone-damped horizontally. (Such damping is a must, in my opinion, for any linear-tracker to perform properly with a high-performance cartridge.)
With the Graham's interchangeable arm tubes, changing cartridges took but a few minutes. It would normally take somewhat longer to switch cartridges in the Rockport; however, since both the AudioQuest and the Lyra Clavis DC place the stylus tip the…
Conventional wisdom has it that large Japanese corporations are insular. But when it comes to audio, Sony bucks the conventional wisdom as much as it does in pretty much everything it does. In Europe, the company has long had an excellent reputation for producing loudspeakers using local design talent, so I wasn't surprised to see Sony launching a line of American-designed and -made speakers at Stereophile's 1994 High-End Hi-Fi Show in Miami. Stereophile writer Barry Willis came away from that Show raving about the Sonys: "What we heard was gorgeous, absolutely beautiful: rich, warm, and deep…