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Saturday, May 21, 9:30am–4pm: The 24th Annual Midwest Classical Record Show will be held at the North Shore Holiday Inn (5300 W. Touhy Avenue, Skokie, IL). Dealers from across the country will be on hand with their collections of classical LPs and CDs. Admission is $2 and parking is free.
It's one of those good news/bad news stories: more people are listening to music than ever before, but the major record labels are in dire straits. Some of the reasons for the record industry's malaise are easy to spot—teenagers and grandmas grooving to music-streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and MOG, or ripping each other's CDs—but the music industry's problems run deeper than lost sales. Digital audio mortally wounded recorded music's creative mojo in 1982, and the record industry never fully recovered.
The arrival in that year of the Compact Disc at first brought booming sales…
The Twilight Singers: Dynamite Steps
Sub Pop SPCD 844 (CD). 2011. Greg Dulli, prod.; Brenndan McGuire, Ben Mumphrey, Steve Nalepa, Mike Napolitano, others, engs. AAD? TT: 43:03
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Sub Pop SPCD 844 (CD). 2011. Greg Dulli, prod.; Brenndan McGuire, Ben Mumphrey, Steve Nalepa, Mike Napolitano, others, engs. AAD? TT: 43:03
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Unleash "Retarded," the unforgettable first track of Up In It (1990), the Afghan Whigs' first Sub Pop album—the one with the eerie stitched-up hand on the cover—and immediately the madness seeps out. No one has ever done the angry leer and tormented spat quite like AW singer/songwriter Greg Dulli. As the charismatic leader of one of the nastiest, hardest-edged live acts…
Head-Direct's HiFiMan HM-602 is the second in a growing line of perfectionist-quality portable music players designed by Fang Bian, a 31-year-old audiophile and student of nanotechnology at the City University of New York's Hunter College. Bian's first HiFiMan design was the larger, heavier, more versatile HM-801 ($790; see my review here). In building the HM-602, Fang sacrificed the '801's removable amplifier module, 15V rechargeable battery, and coaxial input, thus creating a smaller, more portable product. Much sleeker and less substantial than the '801, the HM-602 measures approximately…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Portable music player with headphone and line outputs, USB audio and data inputs, and 16GB of memory. Compatible file formats: MP3, WAV, OGG, and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC.
Dimensions: 4" L by 2.5" W by 1" D. Weight: 7oz.
Price: $439.
Manufacturer: Head-Direct. Tel: (347) 475-7673. Fax: (718) 766-0560. Web: www.head-direct.com.
Sidebar 2: Measurements
To check out the performance of this $439 player on the test bench, I used Stereophile's loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 "As We See It"). For some tests, I also used my Audio Precision System One Dual Domain and the Miller Audio Research Jitter Analyzer. To test the HiFiMan's performance as a USB DAC, I used my MacBook running OS10.6 and Bias Peak Pro 6 to play WAV files, switching the HM-602 from "DAP" to "USB" mode with its top-panel switch. To test it in DAP mode, I loaded WAV and FLAC files…
Sidebar 3: Manufacturers' Comments
Editor: Thanks a lot for Stephen Mejias's excellent writing. We released new firmware at the end of February to solve the noise problem when the power runs out. I am very sorry to have this bug in the early-version firmware. The reason for the noise is that when the player is almost out of power, the battery voltage becomes very low. In the new firmware, we improved the voltage a little bit so that the player will be automatically shut down before the noise begins.
About the measurements in general: Before we designed the HM-602, we tried many…
As B&W's 800 Series has evolved, Stereophile has reported on its progress. Lewis Lipnick reviewed the Matrix 801 Series 2 in 1987, and Wes Phillips wrote about the Nautilus 801 in 1999. I reviewed the B&W 800 Signature in 2002 and the 802D in 2005. This is getting to be a habit.
In the years I've lived with the 802Ds, they've continued to provide wonderful musical experiences, and, like an old married couple, we've adapted to each other. I've adapted to their slight emphasis of the high frequencies and their upper-bass ripeness; they, in turn, have blended comfortably into my…
There's another way to look at this phenomenon. Both the 802D and 800 Diamond could play at very high levels without distress, but I found I could play the 800 at much higher levels without evoking any listener stress. The 802D seemed to have a slight built-in "loudness compensation" that tipped up both the upper-bass and mid-treble; while that was warmly pleasant at normal listening levels, at much higher levels it sounded somewhat overwhelming. Strangely, the larger 800 Diamond had less artificial "authority" at all levels, while lacking nothing in terms of power, impact, bass extension,…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, vented-box, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) diamond-dome tweeter, 6" (160mm) woven-Kevlar FST-cone midrange unit, two 10" (250mm) Rohacell-cone woofers. Crossover frequencies: 350Hz, 4kHz. Manufacturer's specifications: Frequency range: –6dB at 25Hz and 33kHz. Frequency response: 32Hz–28kHz, ±3dB on reference axis. Dispersion: within 2dB of on-axis response over 60° (horizontal) and 10° (vertical) arcs. Sensitivity: 90dB SPL (2.83V/m). Harmonic distortion (second and third harmonics, 90dB, 1m): <1.0%, 45Hz–100kHz;…