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Recording of September 1988: CBS's Serious-Suited Young Jazzmen

Wynton Marsalis Quartet: Live at Blues Alley
Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; Marcus Roberts, piano; Robert Leslie Hurst III, bass; Jeff Watts, drums
Knozz-Moe-King (4 takes), Juan (3 takes), Just Friends, Cherokee, Delfeayo's Dilemma, Chambers of Tain, Au Privave, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans, Autumn Leaves, Skain's Domain, Much Later
Columbia PC2 40675 (2 LPs), C2K 40675 (2 CDs). Tim Geelan, eng.; Steve Epstein, prod. DDA/DDD. TT: 117:39

Branford Marsalis: Random Abstract
Branford Marsalis, saxes; Kenny Kirkland, piano; Delbert Felix, bass; Lewis Nash, drums…

Recording of September 1988: CBS's Serious-Suited Young Jazzmen Page 2

Robert Hurst puzzles me—I can't figure out if he's simply the most tastefully understated bassist I've ever heard, or just supremely adequate. Then I listen to Ron Carter, and it all falls into place. Hurst's playing is taut, concise, controlled to a fault. Though he's no Carter, Gomez, Haden, Peacock, or Mingus, he is a consummate accompanist of inspired conventionalism, drawing no attention to himself. I have to work especially hard to listen to him; not because his playing is uninteresting, but because it so seamlessly supports.

Jeff Watts is simply remarkable. I defy anyone to hear…

Recording of September 2011: Son of Chamber Symphony

John Adams Son of Chamber Symphony, String Quartet
John Adams, International Contemporary Ensemble; St. Lawrence String Quartet
Nonesuch 523014-2 (CD). 2011. Judith Sherman, prod.; John Kilgore, John D.S. Adams, engs.; Chris Allen, Tom Gloady, Nathan Chandler, asst. engs. DDD? TT: 54:00
Performance ****½
Sonics ****

When John Adams was working on his Chamber Symphony (1992), he became aware that his son Sam was in the next room watching old American cartoons, presumably those by Warner Bros. that used music by the great Raymond Scott. Hyperkinetic borrowings from Scott's…

High-End Audio & the Invisible Hand

A recent e-mail from a reader asked why we list the recordings and systems used by Stereophile writers in their reviews. I responded that we do so in order that readers can place our value judgments in context, and predict how those products might sound with different ancillaries and recordings when they audition the products reviewed at their local high-end audio retailer.

"What local retailer?" was this reader's response. The nearest audio retailer was 200 miles from where he lived, and even that retailer had a very limited selection of products to demonstrate.

The scarcity of…

Random Thoughts: On Not Saying Hello to Nori Komuro

This morning, I walked right by electrician and idiosyncratic amplifier designer, Nori Komuro, and I didn’t say a word. Not even hello. Why didn’t I say anything? I don’t know. I had just emerged from the subway, and was walking up 32nd Street, toward Herald Square, and I wasn’t expecting to see an idiosyncratic amplifier designer. I was looking, instead and as usual, at the ground, at the sky, at high-heels and at skirts. I saw plenty of those. I was pulling a small handcart carrying a box of loudspeakers. Nori Komuro and I would have had something to talk about.

“Oh,…

Musical Fidelity AMS100 power amplifier

"That's just silly on so many counts, Antony."

I was talking last winter to Musical Fidelity's Antony Michaelson, who had been enthusing about his forthcoming stereo amplifier, the AMS100. It would be physically enormous—almost a yard deep—and commensurately heavy at 220 lbs. Despite its bulk, its maximum rated output would be just 100Wpc into 8 ohms. It would also be expensive, at $19,999. And to cock a snoot at environmentalists and their concerns, the AMS100's output stage would be biased into class-A up to its rated 8 ohm power, meaning that, even when not playing music, it will draw…

Musical Fidelity AMS100 power amplifier Page 2

The AMS100
The AMS100 is basically a scaled-up version of Musical Fidelity's 50Wpc AMS50, a sweet-sounding amplifier that I used to drive Sonus Faber speakers at a "Loudness Wars" demonstration I did at Denver store Listen-Up in May 2010. Like the AMS50, the AMS100 is a bridged design with both hot and cold speaker terminals for each channel each driven by a complete mono amplifier. But whereas the AMS50 has a single power transformer and a single bank of eight pairs of electrolytic capacitors to supply the positive and negative voltage rails for both the hot and cold amplifiers, the…

Musical Fidelity AMS100 power amplifier Specifications

Sidebar 1: Specifications

Description: Solid-state, bridged, two-channel power amplifier with class-A output stage and switchable balanced and unbalanced inputs. Rated output: 100Wpc into 8 ohms (20dBW), 200W into 4 ohms (20dBW). Peak output voltage: 80V p–p. Peak output current: 200A p–p. Frequency response: 10Hz–40kHz, +0/–0.4dB. Input sensitivity: 650mV for 100W into 8 ohms. Input impedance: 50k ohms, balanced and unbalanced. Damping factor: 200, equivalent to an output impedance of 0.04 ohm. THD+noise: <0.005% unweighted. Signal/noise: >110dB, A-weighted, ref. maximum power.…

Musical Fidelity AMS100 power amplifier Associated Equipment

Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment

Digital Sources: Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP & DX-5 universal players; Apple G4 Mac mini running OS10.5.8, iTunes 10, Pure Music 1.80; Shuttle PC with Lynx AES16 and dual-core AMD Athlon processor running Windows 7, Foobar 2000, Adobe Audition 3.0; dCS Debussy, Benchmark DAC1, Logitech Transporter D/A converters; Halide S/PDIF Bridge, Musical Fidelity V-Link USB-S/PDIF converters.
Preamplifiers: Simaudio Moon Evolution P-8, Ayre Acoustics K-5xeMP.
Power Amplifiers: Classé CT-M600, MBL Reference 9007 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Audience Clairaudient…

Musical Fidelity AMS100 power amplifier Measurements

Sidebar 3: Measurements

To take these measurements, I 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). Before doing the testing, I ran the Musical Fidelity AMS100 at one-third its rated power for 60 minutes, which thermally is the worst case for an amplifier with a class-A/B output stage. However, an amplifier with a class-A output stage runs cooler when under load. At the end of that period, the chassis was warm, with a temperature of 104°F (40°C), though the heatsinks were hotter, at 116°F (46.6°C…