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Made by ScanSpeak, designed by Geva and ScanSpeak's engineers. "The motor, voice coil assembly, and membrane incorporate our most advanced technology." It is assembled in-house at YGA's factory.
Geva believes that measurements don't lie—well, he allows that they can fib, but that a competent engineer should be able to interpret them with great accuracy. He uses aluminum and ballistic allow instead of wood or MDF, he said, because they are the "most resonant free, deadest, stiffest, strongest, least diffractive, and most sonically desirable materials ever found."
He uses a computer optimization program he designed himself to create speakers that "have a ruler-flat frequency with near 0 degrees relative phase shift." Other speakers, he maintains, are optimized in either the…
I don't quite know what I expected, but YGA's "factory" was not what I expected. I put factory in quotes because that sounds all automated and industrial, whereas YG's speakers are essentially built by hand. The speakers are constructed of aircraft grade 6061 T651 aluminum and the baffles are milled out of ballistic-grade aluminum/titanium alloy. On the day I arrived, the factory was being prepped for the delivery of a huge CNC station and a ceiling-mounted crane system to move large sheets of stock from station to station. At the moment, large panels are turned into speaker-sized…
My phone rang and it was Dick Diamond, sales manager for YG Acoustics. "We'd like you to visit our factory and see what we're all about," Diamond said.
Hmmm. I'd visited YGA's rooms at CES and various HE shows. I'd heard their speakers, which were obviously very well made. But I'd also listened to Yoav Geva's sales pitch, which was, shall we say, heavy on the superlatives. In fact, Stephen Mejias even coined a neologism for the audio lexicon: to be "yoaved". But, after all, talking to loudspeaker designers and exploring the ways in which speakers are made is my job.
"Sure,…
It was just a few months ago that I was moaning and groaning about Sonic Youth's latest release being made available only on vinyl. I wrote:
I've collected every one of these burning masterpieces—on CD—going back to those college nights with Todd and Michelle, racing down River Road to catch the 168 or the 175 and finding our way to the Cooler on 14th, or Tonic on Norfolk, and later even watching thrilled and perplexed as Sonic Youth took the stage to make noise at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall.
And blah blah blah. At the time, I didn't have a…
Oh crap. I just received an e-mail from the Princeton Record Exchange. Turns out they've added thousands of titles to their already overwhelming collection of tantalizing vinyl.
The e-mail says:
For those of you who have been lamenting the scarcity of classical vinyl in our store over the past few months, we have good news. In the last couple of weeks we have had the good fortune to purchase several large classical LP collections.Lamenting? I don't have much exposure to classical music, and my vinyl interests have been directed mostly toward jazz and…
You'd think I would have learned to trust Matthew Polk by now, but I attended an NYC demonstration for his new SurroundBar 360 with relatively low expectations. That's because there's a current vogue for low profile, multichannel "bars" that give flatscreen monitor viewers a low profile, single-mount solution to the "problem" of all those extra speakers a multichannel A/V system requires.
Most of them aren't very good sounding and the tiny drivers their manufacturers employ lack dynamic range—and, worst of all, midrange clarity, without which dialogue is indecipherable. Even so, I…
For those of you who can't make it out to the Princeton Record Exchange, the good folks in Princeton have put together an excellent video tour of their wonderful store.
If you can make it out to Princeton, but haven't yet made the time, these videos may be just what it takes to motivate you. I'm sure forum member, selfdivider, will want to make a trip now that he's got his new turntable all set up!
While the PREX offers thousands of new and used compact discs as well as DVDs and even video games, I am especially interested in their 60,000 vinyl titles.
…
Remember all that talk about me just loving the Rega P3 for its plain-Jane, ashen splendor?
Well, yeah, I do love it. But you know what I love more?
I love the P3's high-gloss yellow, green, white, black, and red paint jobs more! I would bite my arm off for one of these.
Now, my only problem is figuring out which finish I love most.
When Ariel first broke the news to me, I was somewhat shocked, and even a little disappointed, by the price increase. An additional FOUR HUNDRED BUCKS for some fancy finishes?! OH, BUGGER. I'll take the gray, thank you…