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I'm a great fan of the musical theater: musicals, operetta, and opera, more-or-less in that order. A typical summer vacation for my wife and me involves driving from Toronto to the East Coast, stopping off to see musicals (and some plays) at places like the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA, the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, CT, the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, NJ, , and the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, ME. The Glimmerglass summer opera festival, near Cooperstown, NY, is not far from the route we usually take, but I never thought of visiting it because my impression…
Photo: Mercury Pictures: Chris Fitzgerald
Madrigal's chief executive officer is known for working well into the night, but that's been a goal of his since boyhood. For many years he dreamed of becoming a professional guitarist, and even dropped out of Yale to satisfy a ravenous musical appetite. "Enough of trying to be a Renaissance man," Phil Muzio recalls thinking at the time. His aim was to be out there on the bandstand making music.
Muzio was born in 1954 and grew up on his family's 47-acre vegetable farm in North Haven, Connecticut. (The land, which his Sicilian-born…
Lander: What does that mean in relation to future Levinson-branded products?
Muzio: We're working to be compatible with every known valid technology. We don't experiment with our customers on immature technologies. Everything we've always done has been a little bit late. We didn't introduce our first Levinson digital processor until 1990, and it was after we had gained experience with Proceed processors.
Lander: You've said your product-development cycle runs up to 18 months or more. How do you know when it's time to begin work on a Levinson product that incorporates a new…
I've never written a love story before, but then, there's always a first time. This romance concerns the stunningly anthropomorphic Jadis Eurythmie II (mostly) horn speakers and the petite, jewel-like and vivacious Jadis SE300B amps—a 10W single-ended triode design with paralleled output tubes.
Kathleen and I, having flung ourselves into single-ended's embrace, have become, to some fashion, quite experienced. I've described the purity of presentation available with the Wavelength Audio Cardinal XS monoblocks when coupled with the Swiss-made Reference 3A Royal Master Controls in these…
"But wait, there's more!"—only a very few minutes of break-in required! I'm not joking. Oh, blessed is he who casteth off the drudgery of break-in from this sublunary coil...All this from an easy-to-handle cable that won't suddenly uncoil and gore house guests, and that was designed to lay flat under a carpet or against a wall! The Goertz has relatively high capacitance, but the secret in the recipe is...very low inductance.
The MI Ag works at least as well on the Wavelength XS monos, and we'll see what happens with the Audio Note Kasai. I'll try them with push-pull eventually—I've got…
Sidebar 1: A Brace of Bs
It was a great pleasure auditioning so many 300B tubes. Here are thumbnails of our experiences with them.
Western Electric 300B: In the way that audio can be anthropomorphic, I'll say these guys are suave, baby. Dean Martin, Sammy, and Frank—the rat pack. The Pierce Brosnan double-oh seven of 300Bs. Or a Ralph Lauren Polo type. Older guy—an arbitrageur—with impeccable style and the cash to indulge it. The tubes are beautifully made and presented—check the serial number on the tube and its box for authenticity. (This is one tube sure to be knocked-off.)…
Sidebar 2: Measurements vs listening
When I measured the Wavelength Cardinal, another single-ended tube amplifier, I commented on its poor test-bench results and noted that it might have been a hot design in 1940. It's only fair that I make the same comment about the Jadis. The Jadis also measures worse than the Wavelength in one very significant way; it has a severely compromised bass response. Though I haven't heard the Jadis horn loudspeaker, which JS used in his review, many commercial horn loudspeakers don't have a very extended bass. [Note JS's auditioning comments about the system'…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
The amplifier measurements here were made using the tubes JS found to be the best-sounding: Western Electric 300B, GE 5692, and RCA 5R4GB.
The Jadis SE300B was warmed up for 1 hour at 1/3 of its rated maximum power of 10W. Nothing unusual was observed in this pretest; the 300B ran typically hot for a tube amplifier. Its input impedance measured a high 135k ohms. The output impedance was 2.5 ohms at 1kHz, 2.7 ohms at 20kHz, and 0.76 ohms at 20Hz. This amplifier's frequency response will be very dependent on the loudspeaker load. Voltage gain into 8 ohms was…
Sidebar 4: Specifications
Description: Single-ended triode monoblock amplifier: Tube complement (each): 2 x 300B, 2 x 5R4, 1 x 6SN7. Output impedance: adjustable, for 1–16 ohms. Output power at 1kHz for 0.3% THD: 10W RMS (10dBW). Power bandwidth at 8W: 40Hz–15kHz – dB; 40Hz–30kHz –3dB. Input sensitivity for rated output: 450mV RMS. Input impedance >100k ohms. Power consumption 140W each.
Dimensions: 8" (203mm) W by 9" (229mm) H by 20.5" (521mm) D. Weight: 65 lbs (29.5kg).
Price: $13,000/pair (1996); no longer available (2012).
Manufacturer: Jadis S.A.R.L.,…
Photo Credit: Tim Austin Photography
A true story: I got tagged for doing a howling 90mph on the way back to New York on the Jersey Turnpike late one night and got off with a warning.
I was pulled over by a beefy young Trooper, lights blinking furiously. Oops. [heh heh]. He saw Kathleen and I weren't nuts, checked the papers and my license, then checked out the Lexus very carefully with his flashlight. There was much oohing and ahhing.
"Got a GPS (Global Positioning System) I see," he said.
"Yeah, officer, the SC 430 is only one of two in the New York area, the…