On the first day of the California Audio Show, I heard some of the most beautiful music in a room hosted by Acoustic Analysis, The Tape Project, and Bottlehead, featuring a system made of Focal Diablo Utopia loudspeakers, Focal SW1000 Be subwoofers, a VTL TL-6.5 Signature line preamp and MB-450 Signature III monoblock power amplifiers, Siltech cables, and a Bottlehead-modified Otari tape machine. The music had such a smooth, effortless quality to it,…
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Dan Schmalle and Luke Manley smile in the background, while Brian Damkroger and I sit in the engineers' seats. Photo by Philip O'Hanlon.
Mirror Mirror, the third album from Glasgow band Sons & Daughters, opens with a single note from a vintage synth. Barely audible at first, it grows and grows and rises vertically in the soundstage—for 15 seconds it grows: a sharp white light in an otherwise dark room—building tension, warning of some sort of danger, as it goes. This high-pitched note is met first by stomping feet, then by clapping hands—single file and far, far off, but growing in size and intensity—before finally being joined by the voices of Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson, singing,…
Brian Damkroger wrote about the Harbeth P3ESR in July 2011 (Vol.34 No.7):
My first exposure to high-end audio involved Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark played through a pair of the original Rogers LS3/5a minimonitors. Like many encountering an iteration of the BBC's LS3/5a for the first time, I was amazed that so small a speaker could cost more than $600/pair, then shocked that so small a speaker could sound as it did. Actually, I was shocked that any speaker could sound like the LS3/5a: Instead of like "a stereo," it sounded like a performance. The very existence of the High End,…
Brian Damkroger's System
The Harbeth P3ESRs shared time in my system with a slightly larger one-way design, the Audience ClairAudient 2+2 that I review elsewhere in this issue ($5000/pair), as well as with my reference Wilson Audio Sophia 2s ($16,000/pair when last available). For the bulk of their time here, the P3ESRs were driven by Mark Levinson No.20.6 monoblock amplifiers, a Placette Active Line Stage, and a mostly vinyl diet of recordings played on a Spiral Groove SG-2 turntable with Centroid tonearm and Lyra Titan i cartridge. I used Audience cables and AdeptResponse power…
Art Dudley wrote about the QB-9 in July 2011 (Vol.34 No.7):
If I owned such a number of CDs that my servants and I couldn't rip them all ourselves, I'd consider buying another CD player to replace my 12-year-old Sony SCD-777ES, which itself replaced a perfectly nice Naim CD3—a move of questionable wisdom, now that I think about it. But today, thanks to breakage, loss, and generosity, my CD collection is contracting, even as my vinyl and shellac collections expand. (The universe is expanding too, but not fast enough.)
Computer audio is not only the right choice for me: It's a happy…
"Good grief, has he lost his hearing?"
It was the distant past, a time so long ago that the M in MTV stood for Music, and I was watching a David Bowie concert on TV. The svelte singer was wearing what I took to be hearing aids.
Yes, I know—there are some things better not admitted. Yes, I now know DB was not sporting hearing aids. Yes, I now know they were in-ear monitors (IEMs). And JH Audio's Jerry Harvey pioneered their use so that performing musicians no longer had to put up with a mono wodge of rubbish sound from the usual wedge-shaped stage monitor speakers.
Jerry…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: In-ear headphones with custom earmolds, 1/8" (3.5mm) stereo plug. Drive-units: 8 precision-balanced armatures—2 dual-armature woofers, 1 dual-armature midrange, 1 dual-armature tweeter—with three-way crossover. Frequency range: 10Hz–20kHz. Sensitivity: 118dB/mW. Impedance: 18 ohms. Noise isolation: 26dB.
Dimensions: Weight: 1 oz. Cable length: 36" (915mm); other lengths available.
Serial Number Of Unit Reviewed: JH163593.
Price: $1149 plus custom earmold fee; includes plastic Otterbox carrying case, felt drawstring bag, cleaning tool.…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Apple iPod Classic 160GB, iPhone 3G; Ray Samuels Emmeline The Tomahawk portable headphone amplifier; Benchmark DAC1 D/A converter–headphone amplifier driven by S/PDIF optical output of MacBook laptop running iTunes 10 and Pure Music 1.74.
Headphones: Sennheiser HD650, Ultimate Ears 18 Pro.
Cables: Audience Conductor.—John Atkinson
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Determining a pair of headphones' optimal frequency response is neither obvious nor trivial (see www.stereophile.com/features/808head, footnote 1). The only parameter of headphones that I measure, therefore, is their electrical impedance, to determine how difficult they are to drive. To take this reading, I inserted the JH16 Pros in my ears so that they had the correct acoustic loading.
The JH16 Pros' impedance and electrical phase are shown in fig.1. The impedance is lower than the specified 18 ohms below 800Hz, averaging 13 ohms in the lower midrange and…
It wasn't so much a vow as a prediction: After selling my last pair of Ticonal-magnet drivers and the homemade horns I'd carted around to three different houses, I supposed I would never again have a Lowther loudspeaker in my humble house.
That remains literally true: The 7" full-range drivers to which I'm listening today are from a German company called Voxativ; the horn-loaded cabinets from which they play were also designed by Voxativ, and are made in Germany by the Wilhelm Schimmel piano company. And, with all due respect to Lowther, the 75-year-old English loudspeaker firm that…