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Recording of October 1988: <I>Pontiac</I>

Lyle Lovett: Pontiac
MCA/Curb MCA-42028 (LP), MCAD-42028 (CD). Willie Pevear, eng.; Tony Brown, Lyle Lovett, prods. DDA/ DDD. TT: 35:41

Jesse Winchester has been silent for seven years now, and we needed some mint-julep–voiced cowboy to write and croon such smooth, fluid, irresistible songs, no sharp edges and none needed, thanks. Thank God Lyle Lovett stepped in; we could have done much, much worse.

It would have been hard to better Lovett's eponymous 1986 debut LP (MCA 5748), a remarkable combination of state-of-the-art contemporary country songwriting, singing, and…

The Entry Level #7

Around midnight, Natalie decided to move the party from her and Nicole's apartment (see last month's column) to our favorite local dive, Lucky 7, just a few blocks away on the corner of Second and Coles, in Jersey City. We threw wide the old red door and stepped into the stench of stale beer, the sound of cheap speaker cones tearing at the seams. I love Lucky's as much as anyone, but the music there on a Saturday night is always too goddamned loud.

Luckily, I'd brought along my Hearos Xtreme Protection earplugs—the best earplugs I've tried. They have a noise-reduction rating of 33dB, and…

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JoLida FX 10 integrated amplifier
With its heat-resistant glass enclosure in place, the adorable JoLida FX 10 ($450; available in black, silver, or blue) measures just 8" W by 7" D by 7" H and weighs a hefty 12 lbs. On removing the amp from its sturdy packaging, I was impressed by its solid feel and fine build quality. This is an extremely huggable amplifier.

Claimed to deliver a modest 10Wpc into 8 ohms, the auto-biasing FX 10 uses two matched pairs of Electro-Harmonix EL84 output tubes and two 12AX7 input tubes, all secured for travel by a block of Styrofoam. To remove the foam and…

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In my small listening room (10.5' W by 13.1' L by 8' H), I never felt that the JoLida FX 10 lacked power—not with the PSB Alpha B1s, and certainly not with the vibrant-sounding, high-sensitivity (92.5dB) Klipsch B-20s—but I did get the sense that music wasn't fully articulated. The highs lacked air, the mids some delicacy and voluptuousness, the bottom impact. That said, I always enjoyed music while the FX 10 was in my system. It was only in comparing it directly with other amplifiers that I remembered what I was missing. Such is life.

NAD C 316BEE integrated amplifier
And life is…

The Entry Level #7 Contacts

Sidebar: Contacts

JoLida Inc., 10820 Guilford Road, Suite 209, Annapolis Junction, MD 20701. Tel: (301) 953-2014. Fax: (301) 498-0554. Web: www.jolida.com.
NAD Electronics International, 633 Granite Court, Pickering, Ontario L1W 3K1, Canada. Tel: (905) 831-6555. Fax: (905) 837-6357. Web: www.nadelectronics.com.

Sonny Rollins <I>Newk's Time</I> in 45

Newk's Time was the third of four albums that Sonny Rollins recorded for Blue Note, and it's the second reissued by Music Matters Jazz, the audiophile house that does up the Blue Note classics right, each title mastered at 45rpm and spread out across two extremely quiet slabs of vinyl. MMJ has already released Sonny Rollins, Vol. 1. That leaves Sonny Rollins, Vol. 2 and Night at the Village Vanguard (itself a 2-volume album). I hope they put them out too at some point. If they do (does this need to be said?), get them all.

Rollins was signed to Blue Note in 1956–57, one of several…

The Perfect Headphone Design?

The subject of the e-mail was “boobsheadphones.” Inside, a simple question (“Can you tell me if these are real?”) was followed by a link to an interesting YouTube video.

Dear reader:
I’m more of a leg man, but I sure hope they are real.
My advice? Squeeze them and find out.

Stephen

The Passion of the Magic of the Exception

I don’t really know what to say about this, so I’ll just quote the press release:

The role of an High End amplifier is to reproduce the music, all the music.

Amateur of beautiful often unique parts, GoldAmp is the Only One. An exceptional musical know-how. Celebrate interpreter who knows how to be forgot. A magnificent story which can be told by moments of complicity in the emotion. Reunion with classicals works henceforth dear to our hearts.

GoldAmp is not a part of these creations inspired by the decorative arts and associating the lacquer, the varnish, the talent of a…

Music in the Round #49

Things move fast in multichannel. No, I'm not referring to the speed of sound effects as they whip around a room—let's leave that for the home-theater mags. I'm talking about audio technology. Since I began writing this column in June 2003, we've seen serious technological changes almost annually, some driven by real needs, some imposed by marketing considerations. To me, the rate of change seems strikingly rapid, compared to that of the products I review for the main portion of Stereophile, based, as they are, in the two-channel world.

Practical stereo for the home began in the late…

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But that's more a view of the trees than of the forest. All of the DHC-80.2's basic and advanced functions have been improved over the DTC-9.8 originals, from video processing using the HQV-Reon-VX processor, to audio processing with the latest versions of Audyssey MultEQ XT32, Dynamic EQ, and Dynamic Volume. Is anything missing? Not that I can tell.

To assess the DHC-80.2's basic audio quality, I did my initial auditions via its multichannel analog inputs and, for digital sources, prior to EQ with Audyssey. Regular readers of this column may recall that the DTC-9.8's sound through its…