search

And Into These Boxes

"Up for another?" asked the e-mail.

It was from Michael Lavorgna. I opened it. He wrote:

I heard from Patrick Amory and it's looking like we are going over his place this Friday for a Road Tour. Patrick, besides working for Matador Records, has a huge collection of rare classical recordings and knows a boatload about them. His system: original refurbished Quad 57s, Leak or Radford amps, a Shindo Monbrison preamp, and a Garrard 301 in a new LignoLab plinth. We'll be doing stereo and mono.

I had other plans, but how could I pass up such an offer? My other plans…

PSB Imagine

Last Tuesday evening, JA and I left the office together and stormed through Madison Avenue's rush-hour onslaught, beneath so much Art Deco splendor, around Grand Central's excitement and confusion, passed happy hour revelers&#151slicked-backed men dressed in jackets and ties as if it wasn't 100 degrees outside, and impossibly radiant women in their picture-perfect poses sipping frozen drinks through tall, thin straws&#151to make our way into Park Avenue's old and golden Waldorf=Astoria.

I hate that "equal to" sign in the middle. It screws up the flow of everything.

…

Mikey In the Press Room at RTI

Here's a sneak-peek at Mikey Fremer's upcoming DVD, "It's a Vinyl World, After All," scheduled to be released later this year. I swear: Mikey doesn't always talk like this. It's just that it's loud at the RTI pressing plant, and Mikey's a little excitable.

Anechoic Chamber

YGA gets its open air measurements by lifting the speaker under measurement away from that pesky floor boundary with a forklift.

The Other Side

More crossover naughty bits.

Crossover

It's an acoustic fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley, crossing over at 1.75kHz, if you're keeping score at home.

Finishing a Panel

This precision sander puts the lovely exterior finish on the Anat's panels. Yes, the machine does the grunt work, but factory manager Roger Wertz supervises the entire time with his hand on a deadman's switch.

World's Largest Capacitor?

Every time I passed the parts bin with this bad boy in it, I did a double take. Man, that's big!

Subwoofer Amp Assembly

The Anat Reference Professional incorporates a powered subwoofer. This is the amp module.

Woof Woof

The woofer for the Anat Ref Pro and Studio II is also an exclusive YGA design. "From the voice coil to the surround and cone, the woofer is the ultimate expression of what can be produced for our enclosures and sub-amp technology."

BTW, Geva explained, "YGA speakers are not 'voiced.' They are created without any objective human bias."

???

"Oh, we verify the objective qualities by experience, but we don't voice them subjectively to sweeten them or change the input signal in any way. They simply give you what's on the recording—nothing more, nothing less."