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Could be. I saved my visit to the Audio Unlimited room almost for last on Sunday afternoon at RMAF. There was the pair of Focal Grande Utopia EMs that apparently had NY retailer Andy Singer dancing at their launch in France last spring. driven by a pair of Boulder 2050 monoblocks. Front-end was either Boulder's new 1021 disc player/music server or the Clearaudio Statement turntable. Cabling was all Tara Labs, including Mikey Fremer's reference The Zero interconnects. Musical Surroundings' Garth Leerer played me just two LPs for me to become awed by the 580 lb Focals: the Gary Karr…
As John Atkinson (right) and I were saying our goodbyes until the 2009 CES in Las Vegas, RMAF co-directors Al Stiefel and Marjorie Baumert were compiling attendance stats for this year's show. Although the fact that there were far more rooms this year, with exhibits spread over two hotels, left some exhibitors thinking that attendance was down, attendance was actually up just over 7%. Almost 3500 people attended this year's RMAF. The Sunday walk-ins were 407—almost 150 over last year.
RMAF welcomed folks from 47 states, Puerto Rico, and 21 other countries. According to Marjorie, "…
Audio shows are tough. As a member of the press and, more specifically, as a representative of Stereophile magazine, I feel an extreme amount of pressure to do as thorough a job as physically and mentally possible. (I should emphasize that I put this pressure on myself.) It would be outstanding if a single person could cover an entire show, spending quality time with manufacturers, dealers, and readers, while also actually having the opportunity to listen to the gear being presented. But no audio show is ideal—not even this year's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, which was, by…
I live by the axiom, “So many records to listen to, so little time.” That’s not an excuse; just reality. And it has nothing to do with being a music writer. If you’re a voracious music fan, there’s no way, no matter how many records per day you slug through, that you can hear it all. If today, I started listening to just my Beethoven Symphony cycles, it would literally be months before I could come up for air.
So in the vein of, “I finally got to listen to…,” Brian Wilson’s That Lucky Old Sun is a fairly amazing little concept record. Wilson’s returned to his most fertile source of…
In the Stereophile forum, "ncdrawl" asked:
What titles do you have that you consider to be the best of the best, sound-wise?
It reminded me of how much I've enjoyed listening to the latest Ratatat album, LP3. As I say in my response, LP3 is not the typical audiophile reference disc—it's not exactly faithful to the real thing—but it is a ton of fun to listen to on the hi-fi. In fact, it's so much fun I think every hi-fi dealer should have the album cued up in their demo room. Sounds explode from the grooves, shoot out in every direction, paralyze and…
We're lucky. There's always an enormous amount of great live music to be enjoyed in New York City, but this week is especially crammed with sound. The CMJ Music Marathon is here. As I type, our very own Mikey Fremer is moderating a discussion titled "Hi Fidelity for the Future." Panelists include NYU professor Jim Anderson; David Chesky of Chesky Records and HDTracks.com; D&M Holdings' Jeffrey Cowan; and the Audiophiliac, Steve Guttenberg.
I hope Mikey is keeping those guys in check. They can be a pretty rowdy bunch, I hear.
I am joking. They're a bunch of…
You'd think that setting up a pair of loudspeakers would be a piece of cake: Stick 'em where they look good, and be done with it. It can be as simple as that, but to get the best sound from your speakers, you'll have to do a bit more work.
Because speakers interact with the room in which they are placed—you know, sounds bounce off of walls and floors and get sucked up by furniture and stuff—paying attention to the placement of your speakers within that room can make a big difference in sound quality. With your speakers optimally positioned, your system will sound…
It’s been a year and a few months since I’ve seen Anat Cohen, the young Israeli-born jazz clarinetist, play live, and she’s grown still more assured and supple, her swing more insouciant, her tone more sheer and gorgeous. She and her quartet began the early set at the Village Vanguard last night with “Jitterbug Waltz” (as she did the previous time I saw her there) and breezed through it with breathtaking speed, but not just as some virtuosic show: there was brio, gusto, real delight in her playing, as she slid in and out of a slew of styles and rhythms—trad, bop, Latin, quasi-klezmer—seamless…
Speakers Corner Records, the German audiophile vinyl reissue label (distributed in the U.S. by Acoustic Sounds), has one of the more diverse jazz catalogues, drawn from a variety of golden-age labels (Verve, RCA, Impulse, Columbia, among others). Three new additions are worth mining:
Peggy Lee’s Black Coffee is a shiveringly sensuous album, recorded for Decca, first as an EP in 1953, then expanded to an LP in ’56. Capitol did the same with June Christy’s Something Cool, and the two albums have more in common than the fact that both singers were Hitchcock blonds who’d spent time fronting…
I should have known by the looks in their shining eyes. When people told me that I'd probably enjoy it, that it was probably a good idea for me to go, they were being coy. But never mind: No words could have prepared me for the enormity of the event, for the knee-weakening prospect of innumerable treasures. And so, on Saturday morning, when I decided to go to the WFMU Record Fair, I was entirely, woefully, indubitably unprepared. I am reminded of my first Consumer Electronics Show. You can't know what it's like until you've been. And only after it's over can you pretend to…