Sidebar 3: Measurements
To measure the NuForce CDP-8 CD player, I used Stereophile's loaner Audio Precision SYS2722 system. (See www.ap.com and "As We See It" in the January 2008 issue.) For some tests, I also used my Audio Precision System One Dual Domain and the Miller Jitter Analyzer.
The NuForce CDP-8's maximum output level at 1kHz was 2.58V, which is 2.2dB higher than the standard 2V. This player will sound louder in any comparison with another product, something that will need to be compensated for. The output impedance was to specification, at 100 ohms across the audioband…
Manufacturers' Comment
Editor: Thank you for taking the time to review our CDP-8 CD player. We are humbled by Wes Phillips' very positive response to the CDP-8, and by the company he chose to compare it with. Both Benchmark and Ayre Acoustics are companies we really respect.
We are also embarrassed and chagrined by the poor jitter measurement. We had felt that the basics of performance were addressed by design, and have been applying our effort at listening and making decisions based on listening. Like Wes, we had not noticed any significant degradation in the sound, so we had no…
Stereophile.com was feeling a little bit old.
We'd have to go back to September 2005 to recall the last major changes
made to our website. It was then that we began adding our forums and
blogs, which moved slowly at first, went through some growing pains, and
finally became some of our most popular online destinations. About a
year later, we made other minor revisions, altering the look and feel of
our site to make it friendlier, more attractive, and easier to use.
These were all great moves, but the nature of the Web demands
near-constant renewal. The time had come for some…
At a time when the heads of most record labels barely know how to play a record, let alone make one, Manfred Eicher—owner, founder, and inspiration of ECM Records, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2010—has been intimately involved in the making of nearly 1200 of them. How many, though, can he actually remember working on?
"When I listen back to them, I know the story of every record," he says without a smile or a moment's hesitation. "There is never an easy record. Every record needs a lot of input and concentration and dedication and passion to be made, that's clear.…
While ECM's wider fame may be built on a small number of recognizable names like Jarrett and Pärt, as well as guitarist Pat Metheny and keyboardist Chick Corea, it's a catalog populated in large measure by unknown, more experimental, or esoteric artists that Eicher has found and signed. His persistence in finding new talent is perhaps the most impressive aspect of his genius.
That ongoing artists and repertoire (A&R), like everything else at ECM, is an Eicher responsibility, and over time the question has loomed ever larger: What intuition does he use to hear and then travel the…
Although Eicher may choose what is recorded and released on ECM, what listeners end up with is the work of the rarefied partnership of Eicher and a small group of likeminded audio engineers he's come to trust over the years. German Martin Wieland, Norwegian Jan Erik Kongshaug, Italian Stefano Amerio, American James Farber, Austrian Peter Laenger and Frenchman Gérard de Haro have each made significant contributions to the ECM mystique, a point Eicher readily concedes. After 40 years, some of the details of recording remain the same. Schoeps microphones have been around since the very beginning…
The English public may not like music, but they absolutely love the sound it makes.—Sir Thomas Beecham
Just as car magazines are filled with descriptions of how fast their subjects don't go and how surely they don't stop, magazines such as ours are filled with descriptions of how neutrally our subjects don't play tones, and how precisely they don't place images in space.
That's good—but not good enough. Just as the automobile's existence is motivated less by a love of going and stopping than by the fact that people have places they wish to be, so is the existence of audio…
Read a few good books on the subject—and I know just where to start. Celebrate Aaron Copland's 110th birthday with a copy of his seminal book, What to Listen For in Music (Penguin Group, 2009, 320 pp.). I bought my copy for $1.95 in the mid-1970s, and it has served me well ever since. First published in 1939—when King Oliver was only one year in the grave, Richard Strauss had yet to compose Metamorphosen, and virtually all music recordings spun at 78rpm—What to Listen For in Music is eminently helpful and almost singularly readable. (In college, I took every Music Appreciation section that…
It may take a few spins for modern listeners to make peace with Darin's unabashedly hep singing style, and some of the arrangements are a little overcooked. But the album avoids sounding dated, partly thanks to the intelligence of the song selections, and partly to the obvious influence of producers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and recording engineer Tom Dowd: giants. Beginning with the first notes of "Mack the Knife," leaping from a groove so silent they'll startle you every time, the sound is nothing short of captivating. In fact, I can think of few other modern records I'd use to convert a…
In sixth grade, I was given a Victorinox Swiss Army knife. I loved it. An avid camper and erstwhile Boy Scout, I was amazed at how many things I could do with this well-made, pocket-size wonder. I used its tweezers to remove splinters and ticks, its scissors to cut thread, its can opener to prize open tins of baked beans, and its knife blade to whittle, occasionally cut myself, and generally wreak teenage mayhem.
As I grew older, I discovered that using specialized tools for a given job was generally easier, faster, and more pleasurable than using my Swiss Army knife's utilities…
