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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…
Before doing any formal or critical listening, I let the Moon i3.3 play for a few hundred hours, using an equal mixture of the USB and coaxial digital inputs, as well as the balanced and single-ended inputs. I noticed no appreciable change in sound during this break-in period, but I wasn't paying all that much attention while it cooked.
That is one hot 2 pin
After the break-in period, I began listening to the Moon i3.3 as a conventional integrated amplifier—that is, through its analog connections. I first wanted to determine if I should primarily listen through the i3.3's single-…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Solid-state integrated amplifier with remote control, headphone output, RS-232 port, IR input for external control, 12V trigger output for remote operations, optional phono stage, balanced input stage, and digital input stage. SimLink controller port permits communication with compatible Simaudio Moon components. Inputs: 5 line-level, including front-mounted 1/8" mini-jack for personal media players; 1 input functions as pass-through, bypassing the gain stage. Outputs: one pair of speaker binding posts, headphone on 1/4" jack, one pair variable…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Theta Miles (S/PDIF output), Bel Canto CD2 (with VBS1 power supply) CD players; Benchmark DAC1 & DAC1 HDR, Bel Canto DAC3.5VB, CEntrance DACport D/A converters; Sony Vaio laptop computer.
Power Amplifiers: Pass Labs Aleph 3, XA 30.5, INT150; Rogue Audio M180.
Integrated Amplifiers: Manley Labs Stingray iTube, Mystère ia21.
Loudspeakers: Revel Performa F30, Klipsch Palladium P17B.
Cables: Digital: Kimber Kable BiFocal XL, Stereovox HDXV coaxial. AES/EBU: Wireworld Gold Starlight. Interconnect: Sain Line Systems Pure (…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
To perform the measurements on the Simaudio Moon i3.3, I mostly used Stereophile's loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It" and www.ap.com); for some tests, I also used my vintage Audio Precision System One Dual Domain and the Miller Audio Research Jitter Analyzer.
Before I did any testing of the Moon i3.3, I ran it at 33Wpc into 8 ohms for an hour. This power level (one-third the maximum of which the amp is capable) imposes the maximum heat stress on an amplifier with a class-AB output stage,…