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When Fred Kaplan asked me to come over to his house and listen to the Boulder 860, he gave me no clue as to what he was hearing. "Just bring some source material you're thoroughly familiar with," he e-mailed.

I'd been by his place before, to drop off a universal player, and had listened to his Parsifal Ovation loudspeakers with the Krell FBI integrated amplifier, which he reviewed in July 2007. So I'd heard his room, his speakers, and a generous helping of his reference discs, including Masterpieces by Ellington (CD, Sony 4694072…

The Boulder 810 preamplifier turned out to be immune to grounding problems between my Audio Precision test set, always a sign of competent engineering. (With well-engineered products, I end up tearing out much less of my hair in trying to find which combination of signal generator and analyzer and amplifier signal and chassis ground connections minimizes hum loops. Sometimes it's "none of the above.") With the volume at its maximum setting of "100," the 810's voltage gain was exactly to specification, at 20dB. Accordingly, the unity-gain setting of the volume…

Before performing any tests on the Boulder 860 power amplifier, I preconditioned it by running both channels for 60 minutes into 8 ohms at one-third the specified power. The THD+N was just 0.001% with the amplifier cold, and was unchanged at the end of the preconditioning. The top panel was below 60°C after 60 minutes, which suggests that the 860 has sufficient thermal heatsink efficiency for its power rating. Like the 810 preamplifier, the 860 was non-inverting and wired with pin 2 of its XLR jacks hot. It offered a voltage gain of 25.8dB into 8 ohms, and its…

Editor: I'm in a hotel room halfway across the country from home with a good bout of the flu and a high fever and trying to write these "Manufacturer's Comments" without sounding crabby. If I fail, then at least I have a good excuse.

When we received the preprint of the 810-860 review, we were all pretty enthusiastic about it, to a point. We learned of four listening sessions and one testing session among three different people, and how the 810-860 combination allowed all of them to enjoy what they heard to an incredible degree. Wes Phillips even considered…

The Audioengine 2 is a powered bookshelf speaker—not a new type of product per se for the California-based company, which for years has sold the…

Now for the fun part
I took the wife and kids on our first long-distance car vacation, to visit family and…

Description: Powered, reflex-loaded desktop loudspeaker system. Drive-units: 20mm silk-dome tweeter, 2.75" Kevlar woofer. Frequency response: 65Hz–22kHz, ±2.0dB. Signal/noise: >95dB (typical, A-weighted). Power output: 30Wpc peak, 15W RMS. Inputs: 1/8" stereo mini-jack, dual RCA jacks. Amplifier type: dual class-AB monolithic. THD: 0.05% at all power settings. Crosstalk: 50dB. Input impedance: 10k ohms unbalanced. Protection: output current limiting, thermal over-temperature, power on/off transient protection. AC voltage: 100–240V, 50/60Hz auto-switching.
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Analog Sources: VPI TNT IV turntable, Immedia RPM tonearm, Koetsu Urushi cartridge; Rega Planar 3 turntable, Syrinx PU-3 tonearm, Clearaudio Virtuoso Wood & Aurum Beta S cartridges.
Digital Sources: Lector CDP-7T, California Audio Labs Icon Mk.II Power Boss, Creek Destiny & CD53 Mk.II CD players; Pioneer DV-333 DVD player; Apple iPod.
Preamplification: Vendetta Research SCP-2D phono stage, Audio Valve Eklipse line stage.
Power Amplifier: Audio Research Reference 110.
Integrated Amplifiers: Cayin A50T, Creek Destiny & Creek 5350SE.…

The input impedance of the Audioengine2's integral amplifier was 21k ohms at high and middle frequencies, rising slightly to 24k ohms at 20Hz, both figures usefully higher than specified. Channel separation (not shown) was superb, at >100dB above 2kHz. The amplifier offered a voltage gain of 26.8dB at 1kHz, 100mV input giving an output of 2.18V at the right-channel speaker terminals. Because the amplifier for both channels is contained in the left-channel loudspeaker, which has a pair of speaker output terminals for the right-channel speaker, I was able to look…

I thought a few entries included one or two selections that were a cut above some of the selections on my original list. So I've harvested those recommendations, from both winning and non-winning lists, with a mind toward helping your holiday gift-list making.

One problem I had with some entries was that the lists were full of…