Its seemingly paradoxical name refers not to any inability of the Silent to create sound, but rather is intended by its maker to indicate two aspects of its performance. First is the ability of the loudspeaker boxes to "disappear" in the sense of not being readily apparent as sound sources. Well, okay, everyone wants that. The other intended sense of Silent is that the woofer and its loading arrangement were…
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Direct Acoustics is a loudspeaker company in Weston, Massachusetts, that sells, by mail-order only, just one product: the two-way, floorstanding Silent Speaker II ($748/pair).
Although I had been aware of Direct Acoustics for at least a year and probably two, had bookmarked its website, and had it in mind to eventually get in touch, what prompted me to take action was a conversation I had late last year, at Parsons Audio's annual trade fair, with the recording engineer and musician Micha Shattner. Micha has some of the best ears I have ever seen at work, and he does not gush praise as a standard operating procedure. Indeed, he did not gush at all over the Silent Speaker II; he simply said that, at the price, there was nothing like it. He also said that, owing to…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, floorstanding loudpseaker. Drive-units. 1" soft-dome tweeter, 6.5" paper-cone woofer. Frequency response: 40Hz–10kHz, ±2dB; 30Hz–17kHz, ±4dB; 20Hz–20kHz, ±6dB. Voltage sensitivity, not specified. Impedance: 6 ohms nominal, 4 ohms minimum.
Dimensions: 25" H by 13.5" W by 9" D. Weight: about 25 lbs.
Serial numbers of review samples: None visible.
Price: $748/pair. Approximate number of retailers: sold direct only.
Manufacturer: Direct Acoustics, 19 Lexington St., Weston, MA 02493. Tel: (617) 538-2015. Web: www.directacoustics.…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
The Silent Speaker's electrical impedance and phase are shown in fig.1. The impedance magnitude drops below 6 ohms only between 100 and 200Hz and in the low treble, with a minimum value of 5 ohms between 120 and 160Hz. This will be an easy speaker for the partnering amplifier to drive. The twin impedance peaks in the bass in fig.1 indicate that the Silent Speaker II is a reflex design, with the large rectangular port at the base of the front panel tuned to 42Hz. There are several wrinkles between 200 and 300Hz in the impedance traces, suggesting the presence of…
Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What
Hear Music HRM-32814 (CD; the LP comes with a voucher for hi-rez downloads). 2011. Paul Simon, Phil Ramone, prods.; Andy Smith, eng. AAD? TT: 38:15
Performance ****½
Sonics ***½
Hear Music HRM-32814 (CD; the LP comes with a voucher for hi-rez downloads). 2011. Paul Simon, Phil Ramone, prods.; Andy Smith, eng. AAD? TT: 38:15
Performance ****½
Sonics ***½
"Love & Blessings"? "Questions for the Angels"? It seems that Paul Simon, who will turn 70 in October, has begun to ask life's Big Questions in preparation for his own exit. Yet in this case, seeming is not reality, and at 69, Simon has returned to his polyglot musical influences (that he may or may not have heisted...but that's an argument for another day) to…
Ladies love the Linkski Design Exposed loudspeakers.
At pretty much the same time (just around noon on Wednesday), five lovely women sent me pretty much the same e-mail:
“Have you seen these?” they asked. “I want them,” they said.
I had not seen them, but they are beautiful. We can learn from this. There must be a lesson hidden here. But what? Girls like concrete? Girls like it raw and rough?
Let’s read from the press materials. Perhaps we’ll find some clues. The designer, 29-year old Shmuel Linski, says:
In my work I tried to give, in addition…
Lately, when I’ve been hungry for some good, uncomplicated, headshaking, soul-lifting songwriting, the kind that drops from the summer sky like a sudden shower and leaves a rainbow in its wake, I’ve turned to Slave Ambient, the sophomore release from The War On Drugs.
Recorded over the last four years in front man Adam Granduciel’s home studio in Philadelphia, Jeff Ziegler’s Uniform Recording, and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album is a drive to the ocean, windows down, head back, shades on. Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, drums, and Granduciel’s voice, rambling and…
It was just a matter of time, I suppose. Almost exactly a year after Rega replaced their popular P1 record player with the upgraded RP1, the British company has introduced the new RP3.
I don’t know anything about it—Rega doesn’t tell me anything—but Rega’s website informs the world that the RP3 is fitted with the new, hand-assembled RB303 tonearm and uses a low-vibration, low-noise 24V motor assembly, hand-tuned to its circuit. (Like the P3, the RP3 can be factory fitted with Rega's Elys 2 phono cartridge.)
Also employed is something Rega calls “Double Brace…
"Sometimes I can evoke the breathless rush of feeling that I experienced the first time that I ever really heard Robert Johnson's music. Sometimes a note will suggest just a hint of the realms of emotion that opened up to me in that moment, the sense of utter wonder, the shattering revelation."—Peter Guralnick, from Searching for Robert Johnson (New York: Dutton Obelisk, 1989)
It's an experience that all true blues fans need to savor. Fly into Memphis, drive south on US 61, into Coahoma County, Mississippi, down to the Delta, down to Robert Johnson country. There, on one of those steamy…
The second Johnson anthology, The Complete Original Masters: Centennial Edition, available only at www.thecompleterobertjohnson.com, is a far more ornate affair—"deluxe" is the word Sony's marketing department uses—whose centerpiece is a dozen vinyl replicas of 10" 78rpm shellac discs, to be played at 45rpm, on which are pressed the 12 singles released on 78s in Johnson's lifetime. Also included in this package, which is limited to 1000 copies and retails for $349, is the above-mentioned two-CD set of Johnson's music, as well as two intriguing collections on CD of related recordings. The…