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The Real Hi-Fi

I adored the sound in the small Son-Or-Filtronique room with the Audio Research VSi60 integrated amplifier, Audio Research CD8 disc player ($10,000), Verity Audio Finn loudspeakers ($6000/pair CAN), and Shunyata cables. Adored it.

To my ears, the system offered an exquisite balance: It exhibited all those audiophile things (imaging and soundstaging and thrilling bandwidth, bass to die for, speed and clarity), while managing to produce the more elusive, intangible emotional pull.

Son-Or-Filtronique's Dany Poulin said the goal here was to prove that "you don't have to…

Box Furniture Co.

Box Furniture Co.'s Anthony Abbate started as an apprentice to furniture maker Robert Martin. A love for music, sound, and hi-fi would soon get Anthony building equipment racks for his personal system. Later, a chance meeting at Max Fish, the colorful little bar on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side, with speaker designer John DeVore, would lead to a partnership with DeVore Fidelity, building John's handsome speaker cabinets. (Oddly, but perfectly, Anthony would later later discover that John had sold him some of his old hi-fi equipment. Their relationship was obviously a product…

The First Spike

Component supports take a variety of forms: squishy, rubbery things; hard, pointed things; ball bearings (loose or constrained); air or liquid bladders, etc. The Spike component supports, imported by Divergent Technologies, were a new one for me: they use magnetic levitation. Now, I'm familiar with platforms using this principle, but these are individual component feet, each with opposed magnetic components. A box of these "Spikes" contains four such feet, and the price for the total is CN$200. I was surprised that magnets could be made strong enough in this small size to be able to…

That's the Champion Wood

Stephen Mejias reported a couple of days ago on the excellent sound being made in the room featuring DeVore Fidelity's Gibbon Nine speakers, driven by a Leben integrated amplifier. I was equally impressed when I auditioned a Curtis Mayfield live album in this all-analog room, played on the Clearaudio Champion Wood turntable fitted with a Clearaudio Unify arm with a carbon-fiber armtube and an EMT JSD5 MC phono vcartidge.

Sennheiser 800

Like many Stereophile readers, I read with great interest, and a certain amount of incredulity, Jason Victor Serinus's rather gushing CES report on the Sennheiser HD800 headphones. Now, I have a lot of respect for JVS's opinions—we share an appreciation of opera and other vocal music, and we're both great fans of Fritz Wunderlich—but, reading his report, part of me was intrigued and another part was thinking "Come on, Jason, these are just headphones, what's the big deal?"

SSI 2009 provided the first opportunity for me to listen to the HD800's, and now I can appreciate more clearly…

The Battery-Powered Veloces

i saw a familiar face when I went into the Veloce room, as Mark Conti, who designed the unusual Impact speakers from a few years back, is now involved in this line of battery-powered amplification. My eyes were attracted by the Veloce Platino LFT-1 linestage in the photo ($12,500), which will run for 70 hours before needing recharging, but driving the Marten speakers in the room via Purist cables was a pair of battery-power monoblocks ($12,000/pair). Battery power? Yes, the input stage, based on a 6922 tube, is transformer-coupled to a high-efficiency class-D output stage based on the…

Monitor Audio Platinum 200

Stereophile readers often wonder about how products are chosen for review, and, as I said at the SSI "Ask the Editors" panel discussion, the Monitor Audio Platinum 200 provides a case in point.

I had heard the Monitor Audio Platinum 300 at last year's show, and was sufficiently impressed that I talked to Monitor Audio rep Sheldon Ginn about reviewing one of the speakers in the Platinum series. The Platinum 300 was an obvious potential candidate, but it had been around for a while, and the new speaker, just introduced at that time, was the Platinum 100, a smaller, stand-mounted…

The Real Thing

An Audio Show wouldn't be an Audio Show without live music, to allow Showgoers to recalibrate their ears. The 2009 SSI featured two concerts, one by jazz pianist and singer Anne Bisson, the other by the Michel Donato Trio, seen here, with Donato on double bass, Jon Gearey on guitar, and Marin Nasturica on accordion. Both acts have audiophile sound-quality CDs available from Montreal's Fidelio Audio, and other news from SSI was that these recordings are now available as 24-bit, 96kHz files.

Editors in Action

Stereophile's star blogger Stephen Mejias hold forth at the debate on why he is in love with vinyl, while Robert Deutsch (center) and Art Dudley (right) wait to chime in with their opinions.

The <I>Stereophile</I> Debate...

...was how SSI organizer Michel Plante had billed our "Ask the Editors" session, and (from left to right), Stephen Mejias, Robert Deutsch, and Art Dudley joined me in an animated discussion. Topics covered included the vinyl revivial, whether there is still a role for paper magazines in an Internet world, how does someone become a reviewer, and will Blu-ray be a viable medium for high-quality music.

The event was caught on video by the Canadian Public Access TV channel and all 11 parts can be found, courtesy of YouTube, starting at http://thecanadianpublic.com/?p=49 .