In addition to being the genius of satire in the English language, Jonathan Swift was also one of the pre-eminent Protestant churchmen of his day. So it is likely safe to assume that when he spoke of "extremes of high and low," he had in mind manners and morals.
But Swift's observation is equally applicable to those who manufacture audio equipment. Extracting the most performance from the least expensive design remains…
Shazam! Gloriosky, even. All you need…
Disc-access times are very fast, so there's no time to go down to the wine cellar and decant something before the music starts. The transport uses a precision, mirror-polished platter with a very slight convexity, to brace…
We generally restrict Stereophile's review coverage to conventional consumer products. But the reality is that many pro-audio components are equally at home in domestic living rooms and recording studios, so we do look out for promising pieces of pro gear. In his July 2003 "The Fifth Element" column, John Marks alerted Stereophile readers to an example, the Benchmark DAC1 D/A processor and headphone amplifier (footnote 1), which he rated highly: "Shazam! Gloriosky, even. All you need is a transport to feed the DAC1 a…
As is my wont when I write Follow-Ups on components previously covered in one of Stereophile's columns, I performed a full set of measurements on the DAC1. The maximum output level from the balanced jacks was a high 12.33V and a little less from the headphone jack, which clipped with a 0dBFS signal with the volume control set to its maximum. The unbalanced jacks delivered a full-scale 3.1V. All the outputs preserved absolute polarity, and the source impedance was a low 60 ohms from the balanced jacks, less than 1 ohm from the headphone output. The unbalanced source…
For me, it all began one soft October evening in 2000. John Atkinson invited me to attend a concert with him. When I accepted, he proposed picking me up at what seemed an unusually early hour. "It's in Princeton, New Jersey" he explained, and off we went.
When we arrived at the Nassau Presbyterian Church there, Cantus had already taken the stage. The audience, raptly attentive, consisted of several hundred boys and young men—entire rows of them dressed identically; it turned out they were from choral schools—and an equal number of more…
Enjoy it? Thrived on it…
Cantus Artistic Director Erick Lichte was very clear about what he wanted: "A clear, focused sound, not a reverberant, cathedral sound. That would not be appropriate for the music." We were talking in the lobby of the Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, after a astonishingly profound concert of unaccompanied choral music. Erick, a Stereophile reader and an audiophile who's served time at a Minneapolis specialty audio retailer, was floating the idea of me recording a CD for Cantus' eponymous label.
Five months later, I was listening…