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…
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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…
With so many ways to get music into the iDac, I was curious to compare them. In the past, I've found that a DAC's various inputs sound much more similar to each other than one DAC does to another. In other words, when, say, its USB and S/PDIF are compared, a given DAC will tend to sound consistent with itself. Changing the iDac's filter setting usually made more difference than changing the input. The iDac introduced a new variable with its iPod dock, so I attached my iPod Touch, which I'd loaded with uncompressed AIFF files from my computer. I had the same files loaded on a Meridian…
Register to win an AudioQuest DragonFly USB Digital-Audio Converter and Sydney Interconnect (MSRP $478) we are giving away.
According to AudioQuest:
Beautiful Sound ... From Any Computer: DragonFly is an affordable and easy-to-use device that delivers far superior sound by bypassing the poor quality sound card that is built into your computer. DragonFly is a sleek, flash drive sized Digital-Audio Converter that connects to a USB jack on a Mac or Windows PC, turning any computer into a true high- fidelity music source.
Whether you’re on the go or at home, listening on ear…
Donald Fagen isn't exactly a jazz musician, but he is a musician who plays jazz and whose music is suffused with a jazz sensibility, whether on his own or as co-leader of Steely Dan, so here we go. His 4th solo disc, Sunken Condos (on Reprise), is one of his best and maybe the best-sounding since the Dan heyday.
Some have complained that the new album doesn't lay new ground, but whaddaya want? The guy's 65, innovation has never been what he and Walter Becker have been about (at least not since the high mark of Steely Dan, which was one of the most innovative pop bands ever), but—more to…
Albert Lee: Tearing It Up
AIX Records AIX 85054 (BD). Mark Waldrep, prod.; Mona Waldrep, exec. prod.; Dominic Robelotto, assoc. prod., eng., BD authoring. DDD. TT: 100:00
Performance *****
Sonics *****
AIX Records AIX 85054 (BD). Mark Waldrep, prod.; Mona Waldrep, exec. prod.; Dominic Robelotto, assoc. prod., eng., BD authoring. DDD. TT: 100:00
Performance *****
Sonics *****
"From a layman's perspective, I'd listen to the 'Audience' mix on my first bourbon and the 'Stage' mix on my second."
Ahh, yes, out of the mouths of . . . audiophiles . . . who like good booze!
Lacking a 5.1-channel surround-sound rig at home, I enlisted the able assistance of "Music in the Round" columnist Kalman Rubinson, who then convinced his son-in-law,…
Fifty years ago this month, Vol.1 No.1, Issue No.1 of The Stereophile, published, edited, and mostly written by J. Gordon Holt out of Wallingford, Pennsylvania, hit the newsstands. Gordon had worked for two major audio magazines, High Fidelity and HiFi/Stereo Review (later renamed Stereo Review), and had been disgusted by those magazines' pandering to advertisers. Not only was The Stereophile going to tell it like it was, it was going to judge audio components by listening to them—a heretical idea in those days of meters and measurements. "Dammit," said Gordon, who died in 2009, "if nobody…
In this list, I give you my top five guitar solos of all time. Various characteristics were considered for placement on this list: technical skill, melodic composition and framework, pop sensibility, harmonization, but no value was considered more important than ‘does it move me?’.
There are no numbers indicating whether one is first or fifth. If the solo is listed here, it is simply one of the best.
Guitarist: Robert Fripp
Song: “St. Elmo’s Fire”
Time: 1:20
Album: Another Green World
Artist: Brian Eno
Amongst a landscape of lush piano chords,…
Since its founding in 1993, Colorado-based Ayre Acoustics has made its name with amplifiers and preamplifiers based on truly balanced, solid-state circuitry that didn't use the ubiquitous panacea of loop negative feedback to produce linear behavior. Their first digital product was the D-1x DVD player, reviewed for Stereophile by Paul Bolin in February 2003, which offered unusually good video performance. The D-1x was followed by the C-5xe and DX-5 universal players, respectively reviewed by Wes Phillips (July 2005) and Michael Fremer (December 2010). But the most intriguing digital product to…
"So now we are starting to get somewhere—perfect transient response, combined with zero-feedback, fully discrete, fully analog circuitry."
Hansen had mentioned that the QA-9's response was flat to around 1Hz.
"Another thing that we wanted to avoid that is ubiquitous with ADC chips is the brick-wall high-pass filter that is intended to keep DC out of your system. Now, it is good to eliminate DC for a variety of valid reasons, but adding a brick-wall filter will create ringing no matter whether it is a low-pass or a high-pass filter. The Arda ADC chip carries its own similar DC…