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Speaker engineer Don Keele almost wrote the book on measuring speakers. so when I bumped into him at RMAF and he told me he had a new speaker on show, I went straight to his room. There, I saw and heard the CBT36, which as you can see, is very unusual in both appearance and design. CBT stands for Constant Beamwidth Transducer and is based on unclassified military underwater sound beam-forming research. There are 72 0.75" tweeters crossed over to 18 3.5" Dayton Audio midrange units, arranged in groups that, with the 36° arc of the 5'-tall array, gives sound that doesn't change its balance as…
Magico's Alon Wolf shows off his new Q1 stand-mounted speaker ($24,950/pair), which marries the beryllium-dome tweeter from the Q3 and Q5 floorstanders with a 7" Nano-Tec–cone woofer. The sealed, hard-anodized aluminum enclosure is braced and damped to minimize resonances. Despite its relatively diminutive size—it measures 14.2" H by 9" W by 14.2" D—the Q1 weighs 60 lbs.
Driven in Chicago retailer Musical Artisans' room by by BAlabo amplification, a Zanden phono stage, a Clearaudio turntable, and a Bottlehead-modded Nagra open-reel deck to play Tape Project tapes, the Q1s produced a full-…
The eighth Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, held October 14–16 at the Denver Tech Center Marriott, with Analogue Productions' Pink Floyd presentation at the Hyatt a couple of blocks down the road, was the largest yet, with an estimated 180 brands on show. We haven't yet seen the official attendance figures, though I wouldn't be surprised if they were a little down from last year, the corridors being more comfortable. But Show organizer Marjorie Baumert, seen here obviously having fun despite the pressure, is to be congratulated for making the RMAF a fun place to spend a weekend and a superb venue…
Something rare and wonderful is going on at New York's Jazz Standard this weekend: John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble is playing the music of Kenny Wheeler, and Wheeler himself is sitting in with the band.
Three things about this are rare: Wheeler, a Canadian and longtime UK resident, almost never plays in the States; his big-band music is almost never played, period (and was recorded all too infrequently); and Hollenbeck's 18-piece Large Ensemble, remarkably inventive and often wittily dissonant, almost never plays other people's music, least of all lush, cushion-of-air arrangements like…
According to Parasound's founder and CEO, Richard Schram, the Halo JC 3 began as a phono-preamp retrofit for the JC 2 line stage, with separate small circuit boards for each channel. The smaller the board, the better, Schram says, so as to attract less noise than do larger boards, whose many copper traces can act as antennas.
Designer John Curl decided to keep the JC 3's design simple by choosing purity over adjustability. Therefore, the loading for moving-coil cartridges is limited to 100 ohms or 47k ohms, with 47k ohms also for the moving-magnet input. Curl believes that the vast…
Brian Damkroger
Back in 2003, the Parasound Halo JC 1 monoblock power amplifier ($90000/pair) drew raves across the industry and set a new standard for design, construction quality, and performance at a reasonable price. In the February 2003 Stereophile, Michael Fremer noted that "if the Halo JC 1 committed any sonic errors, they were on the subtractive side and easily missed," and that he wasn't sure any amount of money would buy better performance or more listening pleasure. John Atkinson chimed in in his "Measurements" section, noting that the JC 1 "ranks up there with the best high-…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Solid-state phono preamplifier. Inputs: 1 pair (RCA). Outputs: 1 pair balanced (XLR), 1 pair unbalanced (RCA). Voltage gain: 47dB (moving-magnet), 68dB (moving-coil). Cartridge loading (input impedance): 47k ohms (MM), 100 or 47k ohms (MC). Frequency response: 20Hz–20kHz, ±0.2dB. THD: <0.005% at 20kHz. Signal/noise ratio, IHF A-weighted: >86dBA (MM), >75dB (MC). Channel separation: 72dB at 1kHz. Input sensitivity at 1kHz for 1V output: 4mV (MM), 0.4mV (MC). Total gain: 47dB (MM), 68dB (MC). Output impedance: <100 ohms per leg, balanced…
Sidebar 2: BD's Associated Equipment
Digital Source: Primare CD31 CD player.
Analog Sources: Spiral Groove SG-2 turntable & Centroid tonearm; VPI HR-X turntable & tonearm; Lyra Titan i, Grado Signature Reference cartridges.
Preamplification: Sutherland 20/20 & PhD & Phono Block phono preamplifiers; Sutherland Direct, Placette Active line stages.
Power Amplifiers: Mark Levinson No.20.6 and VTL MB750 Signature monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Wilson Audio Sophia II.
Cables: Audience Au-24 e, Stereovox, Nordost Valhalla, Nirvana SL interconnects and speaker…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I measured the Parasound Halo JC 3 with Stereophile's loan sample of the Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It" and www.ap.com). The voltage gain measured at the balanced outputs was both higher than specified and on the high side in absolute terms, at 57.4dB moving-magnet and 77.4dB moving-coil. The level from the unbalanced jacks was exactly half these figures, as expected. Both balanced and unbalanced outputs preserved absolute polarity (ie, were non-inverting), meaning that the XLR jacks are wired with pin 2 hot. The input…
Oh boy, another new DAC review. Some folks think DACs, once you get past the features, all sound pretty much the same. I mean, it's just digital. Well, they're right. Pretty much. Just as two new cars of a particular make, model, color, and options package both look the same, sitting there on the lot.
But if you discover a ding in the door of one of them, where most folks still see only a new car, you now see the ding. It might have been there all along, undetected the first few times you walked around the car—maybe your buddy even had to point it out to you. It's insignificant in the…