The sound in this room—we listened to the Beatles in high-res—was clean and fast and my notes include the thought "Like giving the…
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The curvaceous Estelon Model XA loudspeaker ($43,900/pair), which uses a trio of ceramic drivers from Accuton (11" woofer, 7" midrange and 1.2" tweeter) was paired with electronics from Edge, including NL 12.2 amplifier ($24,388) and Signature preamplifier ($14,388), and a transport Drive 2 and DAC 2 from Neodio (pricing not available). Cabling was provided by Kubala-Sosna, and a Running Springs Audio Dmitri AC Power Conditioner ($4500) conditioned the power.
"Tons of body, weight, speed, great, big and open. How big can a flamenco guitar be?" read my notes from the sonically impressive YG Acoustics room. Speakers were the YG Kipod 2 ($49,000/pair). Associated electronics: Tenor 350M monoblocks (Cdn$100,000/pair), Tenor Line 1/Power 1 preamplifier (Cdn$75,000), Bryston BDP-1, dCS Scarlatti DAC, with cable by Kubala-Sosna.
So you want cutting edge? Innovation? I’d say the team in the HiFi One room have you covered. I hope I can do this elevator-speech version justice—the Wadax PRE1-Phono solution provides you with a custom RIAA curve optimized for your turntable to nanovolt level signal precision. They refer to this process as "mapping." How do they do it? Wadax created a laquer "master" that is played on your turntable and the Wadax musIC chip in the PRE-1 captures the associated data and sends it, wirelessly via the Internet, back to Wadax where they analyze and optimize the RIAA curve in your PRE1-Phono…
Klipsch Icon KB-15
Klipsch recently launched their new Icon series, a family of relatively affordable loudspeakers to be sold exclusively in Best Buy stores throughout the US. The five models include two floorstanders (KF-28, $900/pair; KF-26, $700/pair), one bookshelf (KB-15, $249/pair), one center channel (KC-25, $249 each), and one surround (KS-14, $279 each). Matching SW-350 ($350) and SW-450 ($450) subwoofers are also available at Best Buy.
Said Mark Casavant, vice president of product development for Klipsch: “Klipsch Icon speakers are the quintessential choice for avid…
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009): 475pp. Hardcover, $30; paperback, $16.95.
If you plan to read just one book about Louis Armstrong, whose virtuosic cornet solos pushed jazz past rudimentary ensemble playing and launched his phenomenal career as an instrumentalist and singer, make it Pops. Teachout built it on brickwork laid by authors who preceded him, so you'll benefit from their research, as well as from narrative on 650 previously private reels of tape that Armstrong recorded and archived. Moreover, Teachout is a musician and music…
To write about music, you must first come to terms with your fanboy urges. You must brush off the fairy dust and see your heroes for who they really are—a picture that in many cases is all too human. Yet that first blush of idolatry is an experience you never quite forget, no matter how many times you interview a person.
There was a time, back in the St. Elmo's Fire 1980s, when Steve Earle's first album, Guitar Town, was an object of abject slobbery for a generation of rock critics. Turning a near-mint LP copy of that album over in his hands, Earle begins to reminisce about a record that…
"I had always heard that there was a doctor traveling with Hank Williams when he died. [After the death] he suddenly vanished. I toyed with that idea. The first place I went was Marty Stewart, because he has a large collection of country-music memorabilia, including a letter from Toby Marshall to Hank's mother. Toby Marshall was the guy I always heard was the doctor, but it turns out that Toby Marshall wasn't a doctor at all. He was a quack who called himself a doctor. His pitch was that he could cure alcoholism by treating alcoholics with chloral hydrate, which is a barbiturate. Chloral…
"This City" is the album's built-in hit—it played over the closing credits of the 2010 season finale of Treme, and was nominated for both an Emmy (it lost to Randy Newman's "When I'm Gone," from Monk) and a Grammy (losing to Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett's "The Weary Kind," from Crazy Heart). Named for a neighborhood in New Orleans, the much-acclaimed HBO series chronicles the music and sociology of New Orleans post-Katrina. In Treme, which is produced by David Simon, who produced him in another HBO series, The Wire, Earle plays a street musician named Harley Watt. Earle says that in…
More to get excited about: FatCat Records, the Brighton, UK-based label, home to some of my favorite bands and artists (Hauschka, Animal Collective, Black Dice, Johann Johannsson, Sylvain Chauveau, to name a few), has announced the new Palmist imprint, “a project dedicated to releasing limited, vinyl-only runs of artists we love who are home-recorded or otherwise steeped in the DIY tradition.”
The first three releases will be 12” split singles, scheduled for US release on August 16th:
US Girls / Slim Twig
Bitches / Yuppies
Lotus Plaza / Odonis Odonis
These releases…
San Pedro, CA-based retailer Audio Summa brought along a bunch of gear from Silverline Audio, Conrad-Johnson, Parasound, Brown Electronic Labs (BEL), Blue Circle Audio, and Analysis Plus. While I was in-room, we listened to the Silverline Audio Bolero Supreme loudspeakers ($12,000/pair standing on the inside in the picture), BEL 1001 MkIV class-A solid-state amplifier (not for sale), a tube-based preamp designed and built by Alan Yun of Silverline Audio ($20,000) and the Ecstasy Model 20 tube CD player also from the mind and hands of Alan Yun ($12,000). Cables were from Analysis Plus and BEL…