Obviously, the driver is proprietary to Hyperion—and it seemed like a lot of innovation for such a modestly priced speaker. "We like keeping prices sane," Wu smiled. "We think of ourselves as providing balance to an industry that needs some."
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Hyperion Sound Design's Albert Wu holds up his SVF midrange driver. It's quite a piece of work. It has no spider, incorporates what Wu calls "rear pressure reduction," and the flat-carbon fiber plate that I took for a dust cap is really the transducer.
Bob Silverman wowed a select but enthusiastic audience Friday with a concert that consisted of two Mozart sonatas (K303 and K300) and three Brahms piano sketches. He was playing a Steinway parlor grand that sounded wonderfully Mozartian.
Afterwards, the gentleman standing behind me put into words the thought that was only beginning to form in my mind: "Just one of those Brahms sketches was worth the price of my three-day ticket."
And Saturday at 11:30, we get to hear Silverman play a program devoted to Chopin.
Jeff Joseph was demoing his RM7si compact monitors ($2300/pr) with Bel Canto's 150Wpc 3001 integrated amp ($2200) to spectacular effect. Why was that surprising? Because his source was an iBook laptop feeding a usb output into the 300i.
"The sound is great," Josephs enthused. "But the best part is that now you have permission to buy a new, high-performance system for your office."
Obviously, Jeff's chancellor of the exchequer has a different set of authorizations than mine.
"Your mileage may vary," he allowed, "the the limitation is no longer that you can't get the…
We got to talking to Bel Canto's John Stronczer and he pulled us into an empty conference room to talk. "I did something interesting," Stronczer said.
"I wondered if you always need to reclock digital signals when you distribute them, so I ran upsampled data into two S/PDIF outputs into two separate converter/amplifiers and measured the group delay over several days and got no drift. It sounded noticeably better for reasons I don't completely understand, but here's the part that startled me, if I used one channel only from one amp's output and then the other channel on the other…
I could hardly keep my hands off of Chord Electronics' CD Transport and DAC. I'm not kidding. In the new Jet Black finish seen here in Larry Greenhill's photo, the pair is absolutely exquisite, and begs to be touched. Chord's founder and chief designer, John Franks, explained the cosmetic design was inspired by the hard black stone found between the cliffs of Whitby and Staithes. Like many things of beauty and wonder, its origins are fabled and obscured; Whitby Jet is believed to be either a form of carbon or the remains of hardened sap dating back to the dinosaurs. I'm putting…
"So," I began innocently, "how do you determine the shape of your loudspeakers?"
Loiminchay designer, Patrick Chu, gave me a look. "Seriously?" he asked.
I nodded. Seriously.
"I love women!" he exclaimed.
I gave him a look. He laughed and laughed and laughed. The Loiminchay Mandarin Supreme (starting at $80,000/pair) uses a 19" horn with a 1" driver, and employs 10" and 12" bass woofers.
Please forgive my so very foul language, but when I walked into the Loiminchay room, I just had to shout: "What the FUDGE?" Seriously.
That's the truth.
The Loiminchay speakers look like nothing else I've ever seen. "I know nothing about this brand," I said to Montague Luxuries' Mark Montague.
"Well, that's because we're absolutely new," he responded.
The designer, Patrick Chu, is better known for his fine pens. "How did he go from pens to loudspeakers?"
"Well, he's also an audiophile and a collector, and everything he's interested…
Surprisingly, the Proclaim Audio DMT-100 loudspeaker is not nearly as imposing or, shall I say, all-up-in-my-grille, as I imagined it would be. It's actually kind of graceful. In fact, it has a sort of happy-go-lucky presence.
Hi-ho, wanna twist my tweeters? Okey doke. Feel like messin' with my midrange? No prob.
Designer Daniel Herrington seemed genuinely pleased with his loudspeaker solution. "This speaker is different, but it's not different simply for the sake of being different."
While Loiminchay's Patrick Chu creates trouble, locking…
Way back in the day, when I was just a wee li'l Stereophiler, taking orders for classified advertising in Audio Mart, I shared the most enjoyable telephone conversations with one advertiser in particular, Audio Advancements' Hart Huschens.
After only a few brief chats, I got the sense that Hart was a truly gentle and honest person. Six years later, I still have the opportunity to speak with Hart. Only now, we talk about different things: the Buyer's Guide and "Recommended Components," mostly. It wasn't until yesterday, however, that I had the real pleasure of meeting Mr…