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That's how my long, peculiar relationship with J. Gordon Holt began, back in 1978. Born on April 19, 1930, Gordon died Monday July 20, 2009 after a long struggle with emphysema. He leaves behind his son Charles and daughter Alicia, both featured in old issues of Stereophile, his great Colorado friends Bob O'Neill and Steven Stone, both former Stereophile contributors, and legions of grieving audiophiles. We are all struck down by his passing.

Gordon had moved to Santa Fe that year and was yearning for audiophile companionship (…

J. Gordon Holt

Editor: My father passed away July 20, shortly after noon Colorado time. He had suffered a long fight with COPD-emphysema, and he died in his home with his family around him. If you are so inclined, you can pay him your respects by having a good martini and complaining about the weather.—J. Charles Holt, Boulder, CO

Cheers, Gordon

Editor: To the man who discovered, defined, and truly verbalized audiophilia—cheers! Thank you, J. Gordon Holt, for the many years of enjoyment, and—oh, it's hot, humid, and sunny today—darn!

Be with God,…

Sounding adorable and singing in a little-girl voice while aspiring to be taken seriously as a confident, capricious pop artist is a singular blend in the vast expanse of popular music, one that singer-pianist-songwriter Regina Spektor has nearly perfected on her third album, Far.

Nowhere is the range of Spektor's woman-child vision more apparent than in Far's best…

The rules have changed today
What makes the QB-9 different? I'll just hit the high points here. (For the full particulars, see Ayre's white paper.)

To achieve the maximum resolution, a D/A converter must use a high-precision clock circuit running at a fixed frequency to control the timing of the…

I might get burned up by the sun
The obvious question, I reckon, is that if using a computer as a source component for music isn't brain-dead easy, why bother? Well, spinning LPs isn't brain-dead easy either—people put up with the aggravation because they like the sound. Now, for the first time ever,…

Playing the 24-bit/44.1kHz version of Rhapsody, I was hard-pressed to hear a great amount of difference between the QB-9 and the Bel Canto combination. Perhaps the Ayre let me hear deeper into the acoustic of the…

Description: Asynchronous transfer mode, USB-input, oversampling (16x) digital-to-analog converter with minimum-phase digital filter. Input: USB 1.1–compliant. Sample rates supported: 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96kHz. Word lengths supported: up to 24 bits. Maximum output levels: 2.05V RMS (unbalanced outputs), 4.10V RMS (balanced outputs). Frequency ranges: DC–20kHz (at 44.1kHz), DC–22kHz (at 48kHz), DC–40kHz (at 88.2kHz), DC–44kHz (at 96kHz). Signal/noise: 110dB (unweighted, no reference level given).
Dimensions: 8.5" (216mm) W by 3" (76mm) H by 11.5" (290mm) D. Weight…

Digital Sources: Ayre C-5xeMP universal player; Apple 1.33GHz iBook (2GB RAM) with 250GB LaCie & 320GB Western Digital Passport external hard drives; Bel Canto USB Link 24/96 USB-to-S/PDIF converter; Bel Canto e.One DAC3 D/A processor.
Preamplifier: Aesthetix Calypso.
Power Amplifiers: Moscode 401HR and 402Au, Parasound Halo JC 1 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Klipsch Palladium P-39F, Vienna Acoustics Klimt The Kiss.
Cables: Interconnect: Shunyata Research, Stealth Metacarbon. Speaker: Shunyata Research, Stealth Dream. AC: Shunyata Research…

John Atkinson's "Music Served: Extracting Music from Your PC" is a must-read; start there. While you don't need the latest or most powerful computer to use as a server, you do, as JA observed, want a quiet one. My iBook did yeoman duty in this regard—from my listening position, I was never aware of its fan even turning on.

In future, however, I believe I'll take JA's suggestion to use a Mac mini; I discovered how much better my iBook sounds when I maxed out its RAM at 2GB. I can jam 6GB into the…

I examined the measured behavior of the Ayre Acoustics QB-9 (footnote 1) using the Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and "As We See It" in the January 2008 issue), as well as, for some tests, my Audio Precision System One Dual Domain. I drove the QB-9 with the USB 2.0 output of my Intel MacBook running OS10.4.11 for the testing, playing back WAV files using Bias Peak 6.2. Unlike iTunes, Peak interacts with the OSX CoreAudio engine to ensure that audio at the correct sample rate is sent out through the USB and FireWire ports; nevertheless, I double-…