Have I mentioned that I hate Las Vegas? My hatred for Las Vegas is juvenile and irrational and represents what is probably the last strand of my nearly resigned defiance for all things bourgeois, fascist, bogus, and generally lame. I’ve softened up a lot over the last 10 years, but Vegas hardens me anew. I hate Las Vegas. The place is soulless, hollow, utterly putrid, infested with sickness, vice, and abandon, driven by all that is dirty and unholy (I kinda like that part, actually), and, above all, fake. So…
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In my last column, in November 2011, I mentioned that preamplifier-processors are generally at a price disadvantage in comparison to the same manufacturer's A/V receivers. The economies of scale almost ensure this. Typically, to design a pre-pro, a manufacturer uses one of its AVR models as a platform; the result is most distinguished from its parent AVR by its lack of power amplifiers.
Anthem is different. The company has long enjoyed success as a manufacturer of high-end pre-pros, and only recently has introduced its first range of AVRs, whose technology and philosophy are derived from…
One gray and rainy day, just weeks before I sat down to write last month's column, DeVore Fidelity's John DeVore zipped across Brooklyn, through the Holland Tunnel, and into downtown Jersey City, where I sat waiting for him at a gas station on the side of the highway. He slowed down just enough that I could jump into the car through the passenger-side window. We traveled west along Route 78, through dairy farms and deep woods, to the home of Michael Lavorgna, editor of AudioStream, Source Interlink Media's exciting new website devoted to computer audio. Our mission: to help Michael set up a…
To offer some perspective, that same track played back through the Sony PS1 sounded far less energetic and insistent, but did have a sweet darkness that complemented Standish's lascivious disposition.
So I was wrong again: Evaluating a power cord could be fun. The AudioQuest NRG-X3 delivered more music, made more sense of the music, managed to more fully convey the artists' intentions, and made me a happy guy. If you already own an Emotiva ERC-2, does this mean you have to buy a new AC cord? Of course not. It simply means you have the option. You can wrest even greater performance from…
Sidebar 1: SM's 15 Favorite Records of 2011
(In descending order of preference)
Gang Gang Dance: Mirror Eye (LP, 4AD CAD 3107)
Wild Beasts: Smother (LP, Domino DNO297)
Radiohead: The King of Limbs (LP, Ticker Tape Ltd. TICK001LP)
Zomby: Dedication (LP, 4AD CAD 3119)
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto: Summvs (CD, Raster-Noton R-N 132)
Mogwai: Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (LP, Sub Pop SP895)
Fucked Up: David Comes to Life (LP, Matador OLE-952-1)
Thundercat: The Golden Age of Apocalypse (LP, Brainfeeder BF023)
Amon Tobin: ISAM (LP, Ninja Tune…
Up on the old church altar, under the ceiling's massive and ornate wooden arches, in front of an array of stained glass whose center panel has been replaced with a modern rendering of a trio of bluesmen, singer and harmonica player Phil Wiggins and singer-guitarist Corey Harris are nearing the end of their set. Wiggins pauses, looks at his watch, and smiles.
"Time flies when you're playing blues in a church."
Blues in the Church of Chad. Most audiophiles, and especially the readers of this magazine, know that, out on the Smoky Hill River plains of Kansas, in the town of Salina, a…
Kassem gives me a tour of what is easily the cleanest, most comfortable, most intelligently organized record warehouse in the history of the music business. "If you buy the best, you only cry once," he says, showing me the $50,000 in ductwork he had to add to the 28,000-square-foot space to keep it climate-controlled. We move on to the genuinely impressive UPS and FedEx pack-and-ship line he developed "just from trial and error, dude." Finally, back in the stacks, among Japanese single-layer SACDs that we agree are not worth the 60 bucks, no matter how much you want to hear Lynyrd Skynyrd's…
"Have you really listened to all those records?"
My guest, an occasionally nice person, didn't mean her question in a nice way. It was pointed and derisive: a needle intended to burst whatever it was that made me think filling a room with thousands of LPs was a good idea. She didn't wait for an answer—it would have been "Not quite"—but I half think she half expected me to see reason on the spot.
That would have been unlikely. And the fact that she was technically right, if rude, doesn't matter: Virtually all of us are collectors, because our crazy minds are sick with the…
Here's how Fi's simplest amplifier works: The input impedance is set with a 250k ohm resistor, and the input signal travels from the input jack—Garber generally prefers the nice rhodium-plated phono jacks from Kimber Kable—to the signal grid of half of a 6SL7, a high-transconductance dual-triode tube with a common heater. The voltage-amplified signal is coupled, through a 0.1µF capacitor, to the signal grid of half of the 421A dual-triode; the anode of that tube half is connected to the primary (2.5k ohms impedance) of a Magnequest DS-025 output transformer. And there you are.
The 6SL7…
Unlike the mass-market consumer electronics exhibitors, which started their press conference onslaught over the weekend and Monday, the audiophile exhibitors like to maintain a sane CES schedule.
And so for us lucky enough to cover performance audio, the show starts today, Tuesday. And with a full moon setting over the desert no less. Posts should start dribbling in today, and kick into full gear by this weekend.