I was going to write that I don’t know what to expect, but then I thought about it and I realized that I have some ideas: Long days, hard work, lots of hi-fi, potential communication problems, beautiful people, beautiful music, beautiful beer. And that, actually, sounds a lot like home.
The 2011 High End Show in Munich, Germany, will be the first hi-fi show I’ve attended…
I was expecting the LP, a t-shirt, a button, and a bonus 7-inch…
Inside, there are 15 chapters, including “Audacity from Start to Finish,” “Building a Good Digital Sound Studio on the Cheap,” “Transferring Vinyl LPs to CD,” “Authoring Super High-Fidelity Audio DVDs,” and “Configuring Windows for Best Audio Quality,” in addition to appendices on audio hardware,…
It seems a strange question with an obvious answer until you stop and think about it. So many conversations between audiophiles focus on gear and sound, but leave music—that thing which should fuel our passion—lost in the jet-black background.
Ever notice when you and your audiophile buddies get together the conversation is usually 90% equipment and sound, and 10% music? We have been building, tuning, and voicing these systems for decades. Shouldn't the talk be more about music now?
Do you…
Ben Holter, founder and chief designer at Hegel, elaborates, “Jitter is what matters. A DAC chip can only work with what it’s given. If the data-stream is not properly synchronized between the sender and the receiver, even the most expensive DAC chip will fail to produce music.”
Holter goes on to say that the improper implementation of asynchronous mode in DACs can actually…
Guitarist/keyboardist/all-around freakout-machine, Ira Kaplan. I don’t remember what song the band was playing at this point, but I like to think that it was “Sugarcube” from their excellent 1997 album, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.
On this night,…
The genesis of this review lies in a casual comment Larry Archibald made last summer. Larry travels a lot, and everywhere he goes, like the archetypical (archibaldical?) audiophile he is, he listens voraciously. After a trip to the east coast, he dropped by my office and laid a bomb on me.
"I heard a pair of inexpensive bookshelf speakers from Polk that really impressed me."
"Um-hum," I replied dubiously, waiting for the punchline.
Larry's no fool…
That crossover is simple, consisting of a first-order low-pass filter for the woofer—essentially just a series ferrite-core coil. The tweeter's high-pass filter is second-order, using a electrolytic cap bypassed…