DH Labs began in 1992 when designer Darren Housepian (hence the DH) began designing mike cables while still a student at the University of Michigan. The other major players,…
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All the wire used in DH Labs's products is manufactured in the USA; cables are manufactured in the same facility that manufactures for NASA. At least 11 major recording studios use the company's cables, and others will soon join the list. This, along with the nice sound albeit not ultimately detailed sound they were getting from their modest display system certainly suggests that they're doing something right.
Shunyata, which first made its mark with a novel line of US-made power cables named after various snakes and using a ferrite-based powder filling to absorb RF, has come out with five new serpentine products. According to sales manager Richard Colburn, the company has learned how to put more metal inside its cables, thereby increasing their gauge. The copper used is CDA-101, the only copper certified for its purity. Proprietary connectors are unplated brass, which company founder/designer Caelin Gabriel considers to sound the best.
New in the CX Series helix power cable line are the…
Allen Perkins' Spiral Groove has expanded beyond its excellent turntable, which has won major awards in Japan, to issue a new amp, DAC, and cabling. The patented cable line, close to final production, includes speaker cable, interconnect, and digital interconnect. Price has yet to be determined. Proof of its quality is that it used Spiral Groove's two tonearms and the entire line of Sonics speakers designed by Joachim Gerhard (formerly of Audio Physic) and now manufactured in Berkeley, CA. Having heard pre-production samples several of these products at Casa Bellecci-Serinus, I know…
The Pass SCPI phono section ("under $4000") was an awfully slick looking piece of kit. "Basically, we took everything we learned in the Aleph Ono and improved upon it," said Pass engineer Wayne Colburn. The SCPI accommodates multiple inputs and has improved circuit traces, capacitors, and toroidal power supply.
"A lot of listening went into this one," Colburn remarked. Loading and capacitance are easily adjusted on the read panelby way of swith banks mounted between the inputs. The SCPI also allows easy gain adjustments: 46dB, 56dB, 66dB, and 76dB—which ought to be enough for any…
When I went into the Magnepan room at T.H.E. Show, the speakers were hidden behind a curtain. Magnepan's Wendell Diller ushered me into the sweet spot and started playing some sounds on the all-Bryston front-end: BCD-1 CD player (which LKG raves about in our February 2009 issue), BP-26 preamp, and a pair of 7B-SST monoblocks.
Hmm. The sound was spacious, with a well-defined soundstage. The balance was a little lightweight, though lows extended down to the mid-bass. The system was having to work hard to produce high spls, as the Bryston amps' red clip LEDs were occasionally flashing…
Here's an inside look at Ypsilon's forthcoming phono section (price tbd). Clean layout, no?
Here's the phono transformer that completes the Ypsilon phono section—for them what needs it (price tbd).
The omnidirectional MBL speakers, which use a unique pulsating quasi-spherical array of ribbons, make a strong argument for the benefits of this design approach. Featured in their room when I visited was the new 111F ($35,000/pair), which uses the "Radialstrahler" drivers for the treble and upper midrange, with conventional drive-units used for the lower frequencies. A big change from the earlier version I reviewed in 2002 was the use of side-firing direct radiators for the bass rather than the 111B's coupled-cavity LF enclosure. These are mechanically coupled to eliminate vibrational…
tmh audio's Jim Ricketts was on hand to announce that Bow Technologies is re-introducing their ZZ-Eight CD Player. tmh will be distributing the products in the US.
The ZZ-Eight sports Burr-Brown's new 24/192 dual mono DACs and has a revised analog stage and power supply. They've also taken the popular Philips CD-Pro2 transport and bolted it to a 10 pound brass plate. On the back are two single-ended outputs and a digital out.
Retail for the ZZ-Eight is $18,000.
While bunches 'o companies were hopping on the USB DAC bandwagon, Weiss quietly goes their own way, focusing on getting the audio out of your computer via FireWire. The company also sells professional audio equipment.
Their consumer division's Minerva and Vesta converters both accept only FireWire or S/PDIF and provide an AES/EBU and S/PDIF output, with the Minerva also offering both balanced and unbalanced analog outputs.
President and Founder Daniel Weiss was on hand to demonstrate the products connected to an Apple notebook and using iTunes with the Amarra music server…