Below the DAC is the MSB Diamond Power Base power supply running at $4,495 and below that is the very thin WiFi System Interface which brings iPad app control to the…
search
The Diamond DAC shown here has now been upgraded with MSB's Pro I2S Network capability which the company claims is a faster, lower jitter version of MSB’s original network and retails between approximately $20-35k depending on included options. The entire line is also now available in this luscious, but hard to photograph, black finish and it's likely I'll be reviewing an MSB system for Stereophile in the next few months.
Publishing has a way of keeping you humble. Many years ago, after a scheduled show by her had been abruptly canceled, a club owner told me that Etta James had died. He neglected to mention that the two of them had just engaged in a financial dispute and of course being a newly minted music writer, I never thought to ask about any extenuating circumstances to this sad news. The fact that I took the word of a club owner tells you I desperately needed seasoning, but I digress…
I immediately flew into journalism school overdrive with my blazing scoop and cranked out a detailed, heartfelt,…
I missed this tiny jewel of a speaker when it made its debut at the 2011 T.H.E.Show, but it's now in production. As I sat down to listen to it at this year's show, I asked what it cost.
"25."
Okay, $25,000/pair is not unheard of for high-performance minimonitors; the Sonus Faber, Magico, and Franco Serblin stand-mount speakers are even more expensive.
"No, 25 hundred per pair. With the stands.
Now that is extremely affordable for a speaker that gave one of the best sounds I heard in Las Vegas, even if it is manufactured "overseas." Driven by a darTZeel NHB-108…
While Magico's recent high-performance speakers are notable for their all-aluminum cabinet construction, including the Q5 that was our 2011 "Loudspeaker of the Year," the new S5 ($28,600/pair) uses a more conventional enclosure to bring its price within reach of more than just the 1%. While it still uses a beryllium-dome tweeter, this is not made in house.
Costing $165,000/pair, Magico's new Q7—shown here with AudioStream.com editor Michael Lavorgna for scale—embodies everything the Californian company knows about speaker design: a proprietary beryllium-dome tweeter, nano-fiber–sandwich-cone midrange unit and woofers, housed in a sealed all-aluminum enclosure weighing 750 lbs! With the prototype Audeeva music server, Pacific Microsonics DAC, a Spectral preamp, MIT cables, and unidentified amplifiers hidden behind a curtain, the Q7s threw an enormous soundstage on a 176.4kHz/24-bit file of a Reference Recordings orchestral recording, with bass-…
Here's a closer "glamor shot" of the new G3Giya loudspeaker, though it doesn't do justice to the deep gloss maroon finish of the speaker. Note how the fact that the tweeter and upper-midrange unit have to be mounted higher up the curve of the "tail" means that the transmission lines loading these drive-units have become a styling feature rather than being buried within the enclosure.
Source Interlink Media's Home-Tech Group's self-styled "Web Monkey" Jon Iverson (center) focuses his attention on the new Vivid G3Giya loudspeaker ($40,000/pair), which is scheduled to start shipping in April. Driven by a Luxman amplifier and hooked up with Kubala-Sosna Emotion cables, the G3Giya is a 2/3 scale version of the G1Giya that so impressed Wes Phillips in July 2010, with twin aluminum-cone 7.5" woofers loaded by the same proprietary ported transmission line, this time curled over more severely because of the speaker's reduced height. (The G1Giya used 11" woofers.)
Phillip O'…
At the previous Shows where I had auditioned it, MBL's extravagantly excessive (or should that be excessively extravagant) X-Treme system had been set-up in inappropriate rooms, Finally, at the 2012 CES, this 4-enclosure system, which basically comprises two of the true omnidirectional upper-frequency modules of the Berlin-based company's 101E Mk.2 speaker (to be reviewed by Mikey Fremer in the April 2012 issue) with two man-sized powered subwoofers, each using six 12" drivers mounted three on each side to cancel mechanically induced vibrations, was set up in a room worthy of it. (The…
Photo: John Atkinson
It looks sort of pretty, doesn't it?
Imagine how much prettier it would be if it were real. Imagine again how much prettier it would be if those bridges and roads and towers weren't there at all.
Every time I stepped from the slow elevator and onto the casino floor at Harrah's, where Stereophile's editors spent their sleepless nights, my hatred for Las Vegas was revitalized. This was like some kind of bad joke, some kind of post-modern torture. Oh, god, I am still here. I would turn right and see the same flashing lights, the same low ceilings, the…
Whether you knew it or not, Stereophile is on Facebook! The Stereophile Facebook livefeed is updated regularly with links to articles posted on the Stereophile website, new product releases and announcements from within the hi-fi industry, and entertaining tidbits on music, sound, and the science of hearing.
Regular updates began in mid-November 2010. At this time, we had approximately 290 regular monthly users. After over two years of continuous updates, the number of regular monthly users leaped up to 2,684, well over a 900% increase, and of all those monthly users, 41% visit the…