The No.38 exhibited extraordinary technical performance on the bench—its measurements were as good as preamplifiers get. First, I measured an input impedance of between 95k ohms and 115k ohms at the balanced inputs, within measurement error of the specified 100k ohms. The single-ended inputs had an input impedance of 90k ohms. With an active volume control, the preamplifier doesn't have the "bomb-proof" input overload characteristic typical of a passive potentiometer. The No.38's input-overload margin (fig.1) was exactly as specified: 16V at the balanced inputs,…
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Steven Stone compared the No.38 with the Threshold T2 in July 1995 (Vol.18 No.7):
I had an opportunity to briefly use the Mark Levinson No.38 in my small-room system, but I didn't do any tightly controlled A/B tests against the Threshold T2. I don't think the No.38 is in the same sonic league as the T2—it was never able to move me emotionally. It sounded clean and quiet but dead, and lacked life, sparkle, and musical joie de vivre. The No.38 also seemed dynamically compressed, with little differentiation between ff and fff passages.
With the T2, musical contrasts were quite well-…
John Atkinson compared the No.38 with the No.38S in July 1995 (Vol.18 No.7):
Before the Mark Levinson No.38S took pride of place in my system, I used the sample of the No.38 reviewed by Robert Harley for several months. The basic '38 is functionally the same as the 'S version, but soundwise, there was no contest. The balance of the less-expensive preamp is smooth, but in comparison with the 'S, it lacked detail and clarity. It's not that it sounded dark in, say, the way the Melos SHA-1 does, but the No.38 failed to get enough of a handle on the excitement embedded in the recordings. On…
Would you really want a perfect hi-fi?
Indulge my fantasy for a second—I'm talking about a system with DC-to-light bandwidth, zero noise and distortion, and unlimited dynamic range and resolution. It's an audiophile conundrum: When output precisely matches input, have we attained nirvana?
Maybe not. Most CDs and LPs aren't all that transparent, so I'm wondering if our obsession with transparency is misplaced. Soundstaging? Not if you listen to rock or jazz—the music's spatial depth, low-level ambience, dimensionality, and reverberation are all fabricated in the mix.…
JASON ISBELL: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Lightning Rod/Thirty Tigers LRR-99682 (CD). 2009. Jason Isbell, prod.; Matt Pence, prod., eng. AAD? TT: 52:09
Performance ****½
Sonics ****
Lightning Rod/Thirty Tigers LRR-99682 (CD). 2009. Jason Isbell, prod.; Matt Pence, prod., eng. AAD? TT: 52:09
Performance ****½
Sonics ****
It always starts with some chick. She saves him. Or she breaks 'im in two. And suddenly a song that will define some singer-songwriter's career jumps out of his head, trickles down his arm, out of his fingers, onto paper, and across the strings.
For Jason Isbell, that woman "smelled like cigarettes and wine / and she kept me happy all the time." And in a quatrain where Isbell separates…
A couple months back, a question from a dealer set me back in my chair: "Are you guys really going to put out Stereophile on a monthly basis?" I was surprised—when he put the question, we were just starting production work on the issue you hold in your hands, the twelfth to hit the stands since we started publishing monthly. Beginning with Vol.10 No.5 in August 1987, a Stereophile has gone in the mail every month, pretty much on time despite having gone through the trauma of changing printers last December on one issue's notice.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to say thanks to…
Gordon makes a good case. Recently, however, he and I paid a visit to San Francisco, where VMPS's Brian Cheney had asked us to play some of our recordings to the local Audio Engineering Society chapter. Before the meeting, we spent an interesting afternoon listening to two systems: Brian's Super Tower IIa/R SE speakers in his completely live-end/dead-end treated listening room, where I felt they sounded much better, driven by Meitner electronics, than they did in JGH's listening room (footnote 3) (though Brian's new Yamaha grand piano sounded considerably better still); and David Wilson's…
It's been a while since I auditioned a Meridian CD player in my system. I had enthusiastically reviewed the English company's groundbreaking Pro-MCD player in early 1986, and over the years had kept up with the progress they were making in digital playback, either through my own reviews or by performing the measurements to accompany reviews by other Stereophile writers. The 508-24 player, reviewed by Wes Phillips in May 1998, was one of the finest digital products of the 1990s, I thought. But when Meridian began promoting surround sound and DVD-Audio at the turn of the century, their goals…
The apodizing filter used in the 808.2 and 808i.2 was optimized using listening tests. It is realized using a DSP chip operating at 150MIPs with 48-bit precision that also performs the upsampling. It appears that the CD data are first upsampled to 88.2kHz, then processed by the apodizing filter which has a null at 22.05kHz. This is the datastream that is fed to the Meridian's SpeakerLink digital output. The DSP chip then further upsamples the data to 176.4kHz to feed the player's DAC chips.
Sound
For this review, I focused on the Meridian 808i.2's performance as a standalone CD…
For my first comparison I used Robert Silverman's performance of Liszt's Liebestraum, from Editor's Choice (CD, Stereophile STPH015-2). The result wasn't what I was expecting from my prior auditioning of this track with the CD played in the Meridian, in that the piano now sounded a touch more bright and not as palpable. The Ayre was clearly preferable. I checked the setting of the dCS. Ah...I'd forgotten to change the 972's output frequency from 96kHz to 44.1kHz, meaning that the dCS was upsampling the CD data before sending it to the Meridian, an additional variable that worked against the…