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Larry Greenhill's May 2010 review of JBL's Synthesis 1400 Array BG loudspeaker was a highlight of that year's issues for me. At $11,500/pair, the 1400 Array offers a huge but highly neutral sound from its 15" woofer and horn-loaded midrange unit and tweeter. At RMAF, the JBLs were being driven by a Mark Levinson No.512 SACD player, No.326S preamplifier, and a pair of No.531H amplifiers, all hooked up with Transparent cables. The room's acoustics had been tamed with ASC Tube Traps and the sound was as good as I was expecting.
The Tape Project’s Piper Payne is a talented mixing and mastering engineer and an active member of the Audio Engineering Society. (Be still, John Atkinson's beating heart!) She also enjoys origami, bunnies, the blues, and Bottlehead headphone amplifiers.
I'm just kidding about the bunnies.
The little card says it all, so I don’t have to. (Thank goodness.) It’s the beautifully designed Bottlehead Smack WOT (with output transformers) headphone amplifier kit.
Adjustable output impedance: 16, 32, 64, or 128 ohms
Works with headphones from 16 to 600 ohms
Switchable single-ended TRS or balanced XLR outputs
200mW outputs—6-10dB headroom over IHF standards
Uses 5687/7119 tubes with Bottlehead’s premium active-loaded, hybrid shunt-regulated, single gain stage circuit topology
Custom output transformers designed by Bottlehead’s Paul Joppa
Retail price: $549…
The Tape Project’s Piper Payne enjoys an iced coffee while listening to a Bottlehead headphone amplifier driving AKG K1000 ear speakers—be still, John Marks' beating heart!—and receiving a massage from Bottlehead’s Dan Schmalle.
The JH Audio booth was always busy with eager listeners. Read John Atkinson's review of the company's top-of-the-line JH16 Pro.
Emotiva’s Danielle Laufman had impressions made of her ear canals at the Westone booth. Both Danielle and her mom, Cathy, would be getting custom ear plugs, while Danielle’s father, Emotiva’s founder Dan Laufman, would be using his ear molds for custom in-ear monitors.
Bob’s Devices’ Bob Sattin was especially excited about his new CineMag 1131 (Blue) step-up transformer ($895). These transformers are especially developed for use with low-output moving-coil cartridges and represent the very best that CineMag has to offer. Hand-made and very limited.
As we can tell from Michael Lavorgna’s awesome reporting over at AudioStream, computer audio was very hot indeed at RMAF, but there were still lots of old-fashioned vinyl enthusiasts to be found digging through the old-fashioned crates for old-fashioned music.
Kimber Kable’s Nate Mansfield greets everyone with a warm and friendly smile. He was presenting Kimber’s entire line of speaker cables and interconnects, from the truly affordable Tonik (see Art Dudley’s review in our November issue) and the classic PBJ to the cost-no-object Kimber Select Series. I’ve never heard Kimber Kable in my own system—a crime, I know. I’ll have to fix that sometime in 2012.
The Signal Collection exhibited a small and elegant system made up of the unique Davone Audio Ray loudspeakers ($7500/pair), jewel-like Absoluta Partenope integrated amplifier ($15,995), super skinny (just the way I like them) Black Cat Morpheus loudspeaker cables ($350/3m pair), and Stereolab Tombo interconnects and power cable (prices to be determined). MA Recordings Todd Garfinkle was selecting the tunes from his collection of wonderful SACDs and playing them through a Korg MR2000s digital recorder/playback unit ($2499).
The Absoluta Partenope integrated seemed to be hovering…