Imani Coppola's The Black & White Album was playing strong in the Music Hall suite. Imani sings:
Sometimes life may feel like it's sucking you up
But, nah, it may just be you sucking.
Yo, I been there, Imani.
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Whenever I run into my audiophile doppelganger, Music Hall's Leland Leard, I'm sure to ask him about what's new in his playlist.
"Have you heard the new Imani Coppola?" he asked.
"Nope."
"Oh, I've gotta play it for you..."
Leland dropped everything—two phono preamps, a bottle of Scotch, a pretty girl's phone number, Roy Hall's pants—and skipped over to the CD player to share some music with me.
Soon, Imani was singing, and I could easily hear why Leland's been so into her. Leland likes his music raunchy.
Dudes! We're in Las Vegas. This town is bananas, all sex and smoke and blurry light, gambling and booze and deep fried foods.
And, of course, high end hi-fi.
I don’t know what Paul Motian’s doing, I don’t understand how he’s doing it, all I know is that it’s wonderful. I’ve just returned from seeing the Motian 3 at the Village Vanguard, a high-powered trio that consists of Motian, Jason Moran, and Chris Potter (and no bassist to hold the anchor). Moran, just shy of 33, is, as I’ve written many times, the most extraordinary jazz pianist around. Potter, 37, as I’ve noted a couple times, is a tenor saxophonist with a galvanic tone and fleet agility. But Motian, at 76 (older than both of his trio mates combined, playing topnotch jazz since his days…
I have seen few turntables, no any mechanical devices more likely to induce flat-out gadget lust than the $150,000 Transrotor Artus. It has a magnetically coupled drive assembly, which means no points of contact between motor and platter. It's machined from solid billets of high-grade aluminum, finished to an impeccable sheen. Its deck is gimbal-mounted to freakishly huge counterweights for absolute level and stability (think gyroscope here). Its power supply uses something called "Konstant M3," which I gather is pretty special, but my limited German and the Transrotor rep's far less…
When I first received an email from ESS announcing a new DAC, I assumed someone had revived the old Electro Static Sound, but I was wrong.
"We've been making semiconductors since 1984," sales and marketing VP Robert Wong told me. "We started out making voice chips for talking dolls and toys, then got heavily into chips for soundcards and games, and eventually made chips for cell phones and CD video players. However, we are totally committed to quality and the competition is increasingly price-based for components that are 'almost as good.' We don't do almost as good. We make…
The highlight of the VRS Audio Solutions room was witnessing VRS' Vincent R. Sanders and Neil Sinclair (high-end pioneer and former owner of Theta Digital) engage in a heated discussion over optimal methods for achieving hard disk-stored music playback. These two went at it as if dealing with life and death itself. Which, in the case of high-end audio, isn't far from the truth.
Sanders has created the VRS Revelation DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), "a three-component sonic solution based on the Apple/Mac platform that consists of playback software, an external clock, and an…
It's always fun to drop in to the Burmester Suite. When Dieter Burmester, the firm's founder (left), and Udo Besser, the CEO (right), are not working on the latest sound system updates to the 1.2 million Euro Bugatti Veryon 16.4 supercar, they build massive loudspeakers and amplifiers for home consumers and audiophiles.
This year, they were eager to show me the new baby Burmester, the $12,000/pair, 60-lb, three-way, floorstanding B-25 speaker. The company's flagship B-100, by comparison, costs over 6 times as much, weighs four times is much, and is twice as tall. The differences…
New Zealand-based Plinius is now using words drawn from the Maori language to name all of its new products. Making truly beautiful sounds in an all-Plinius line-up, the new Tautoro linestage preamplifier ($7300), set to ship in May, fulfilled its promise to "bridge the gap" from Plinius' top-of-the-line SA-Reference power amplifier to its CD-101 CD player and Koru phono stage (available as an option for $8600 total). When I asked Scott Markwell of Elite Audio Video Distribution how the preamp differs from its M8 predecessor, he pointed out that the M8 could only function as a linestage…
Conrad-Johnson Design, well-known purveyors of vacuum-tube electronics, introduced the ET2 Enhanced Triode preamplifier, featuring a single-ended triode voltage gain stage direct-coupled to a high-current output buffer. For once, this is not another $18k preamp; the price is a relatively modest $3500.
Conrad-Johnson was also showing the CD2B ($8500), which marries a tubed analog output section to a DAC that handles both CDs and SACDs. Details were tantalizingly scarce, but Lew Johnson and Bill Conrad expect to ship the unit by "mid-year."
Since CJ always sets up a static…