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CES 2008: Year of the Music Server

Throughout 2006 and much of 2007, we got the feeling at Stereophile that most audiophiles were scoffing at the idea of a music server in their system.

But sometime last year, perceptions changed. Here we are at the 2008 CES and music servers and related products are popping all over the Venetian and at THE Show.

And then there were the surprising online poll results this week.

We asked in our Vote this past week if you are ready for an audiophile music server, and the response and number of comments have been overwhelming. A whopping 32% of you already have a server of…

CES Countdown: 358 days to CES2009

It must be the week after the Consumer Electronics Show: I'm all written out on consumer electronics, my feet hurt, and I have a cold. All three happen every year.

I spent my downtime yesterday—my "travel day" back from Las Vegas got me home around 2am Saturday, so that day was essentially shot—surfing the web, looking at CES reports. Somehow, every year, the mainstream press gets the focus wrong, concentrating on what will be the next big thing. Large electronics companies don't know what the next big thing is—they're just throwing a bunch of spaghetti on the wall, hoping some of…

CES Countdown, part the twooth: 357 days to CES2009

In yesterday's philippic about CES's petty annoyances, I said that I continue to be a recidivist in spite of them. The reason? Pretty much that the high-end portion of the industry remains a fascinating, personal, and essentially civilized place.

No, it is not that CES allows me to glimpse the direction of audio technology over the coming year.

Truth be told, the high-end is frequently as clueless about the next big thing as the big guys. This year, for example, it seemed like iPod docks were everywhere. That's not a bad thing, but as Stereophile web monkey Jon Iverson…

Frank Kimbrough's <I>Air</I>

In my last blog, I referred to “my friend, the pianist Frank Kimbrough,” so some of you may be leery when I tell you in this entry that Kimbrough’s new CD, and his first solo work, Air (on Palmetto Records), is a terrific piece of work, one of the half-dozen or so great solo piano albums of the past few years. If your suspicions keep you from checking it out, well, your loss.

I’ve been listening to Kimbrough for 20 years now, ever since he was a protg of Shirley Horn, up through his years as co-director (with bassist Ben Allison) of the Jazz Composers Collective, his longtime stint in…

Passion, I said

It was a quarter to five on the last day of the show, and I was feeling good. I mentioned this to John Atkinson. He was sitting there beside me. The bus was empty but for us. We were waiting to go back to our hotel, waiting to leave the noise and smoke and lights of the crowded, extravagant Venetian. The place is madness. All of Vegas is madness.

That's not true. There are parts of Vegas I've only glimpsed, have only imagined, haven't seen. There are parts of Vegas that are long and narrow and covered in sand-colored stone. People live there.

It's always this…

So Long, Flashy

For many years one of my most beloved guilty pleasures has been reading George MacDonald Frasier's books. Not just the Flashman Papers, which I have found delightful and from which I have learned a lot of 19th century history, but also his McAusland novels, his Mr. American,his spirited adventure novel Candlemass Road (which, at a taut 181 pages, is one of the finest examples of economical action writing ever), and his masterful history of the Scottish boarder wars, The Steel Bonnets.

Fraser also wrote two of my favorite movies: The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, as well as a…

Vegas Cat

On my travel day to Vegas, I awoke at 3am and flew six hours to the desert city. When I checked into my hotel, I stripped off my outerwear and napped.

When I awoke, I wandered bleary-eyed into the suite's living room and saw what I took to be Bagheera sleeping on the sofa. "Did she hide in my suitcase last night?" I briefly wondered.

Nope. Time to hang up some clothes.

Nelson-Reed 8-04/B loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 2: Measurements

As I was due to drive up to Colorado with my daughter for the 1991 Denver Grand Prix (footnote 1) when JGH told me about the bass problem he was having with the Nelson-Reeds, I dragged along the MLSSA measurement setup to his new home in Boulder. My room measurements confirmed the presence of the midbass suckout when the speakers were set up symmetrically, though they also showed that JGH's room has a nicely controlled and even reverberant characteristic, ranging from 0.3s at 250Hz to 0.2s at 8kHz.

Fig.1 shows the spatially averaged in-room response from…

Nelson-Reed 8-04/B loudspeaker How to Calculate Maximum SPL

Sidebar 3: How to Calculate Maximum SPL

If you have a scientific calculator (or a slide rule, or a set of log tables), it is easy to calculate, from a loudspeaker's sensitivity rating, how much Sound Pressure Level it will put out with a given amount of available amplifier power.

Since a sensitivity rating is a statement of SPL of acoustic output with 1W of signal input (at 400 or 1000Hz), it will be increased according to the difference in deciBels between the amplifier's rated maximum output and that 1W reference level. To calculate this, take the amplifier's rated output,…

Nelson-Reed 8-04/B loudspeaker Specifications

Sidebar 4: Specifications

Description: Floor-standing, three-way, dynamic loudspeaker reflex woofer loading (system Q = 0.7, optimal damping). Drive-units: two 8" cone woofers, one 3" doped-linen dome midrange, one ¾" soft-dome tweeter (B), 1" metal-dome tweeter (CM). Crossover frequencies: 300Hz, 6kHz (B); 320Hz, 4.2kHz (CM). Nominal impedance: 8 ohms, 6 minimum. Frequency response: 32Hz–20kHz ±3dB, . Sensitivity: 92dB. Maximum acoustic output: 120dB SPL at 500W RMS in. Linear continuous output (3dB compression): 114dB at 320W RMS. THD at 1kHz: 0.15% at 100dB, 0.35% at 110dB SPL.
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