What the hotel offers audiophiles, besides its amenities and lovely waterfront, is its neighbor across the street, Jacoby Hall in the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts. Home of the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, the hall's much touted superior acoustics—…
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The largest consumer audio show in America's Southland, AXPONA (Audio Expo North America), returns to its roots when it opens in Jacksonville on Friday March 9. The three-day show, which launched in Jacksonville in 2010, has happily switched locations from a "not-ready-for-primetime" venue to the more upscale Omni Jacksonville.
It was already way past dark and I could hardly make it out, but it was the first thing that really caught my eye upon arriving in Seattle for the Definitive Audio Music Matters event (report to come). Could it be possible that there was a record store right across the street from my hotel? I had seen the black and white sign—Records, CDs, and Tapes—but still, I couldn’t be sure. That sign could have announced a place that once was, a place once filled with treasures, long forgotten or dearly missed.
I decided to check it out as soon as I could. When I did, I was very…
During Definitive Audio's Music Matters 7, held Wednesday, February 29th, in Seattle, Linn's Steve Croft presented his company's Music Moments page, where people can share their fond musical memories.
Back in January, after having spent a few days in Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, I felt as though I had been robbed. Not only had I lost sleep, I had lost my patience, lost my way, perhaps even lost a bit of my soul. I’m exaggerating. My soul is intact, but the maddening experience of the 2012 CES was enough to make me wonder why we go through with it every year. Why CES…
Brian Damkroger wrote about the AdeptResponse aR12-TS in January 2012 (Vol.35 No.1):
When I reviewed Audience's original Adept Response power conditioner, in the April 2007 issue, I was impressed. Audience's approach of combining filtering, power-factor correction, and isolation made big improvements in the sound of my system, even though I already had a dedicated subpanel, optimized AC wiring, and top-quality wall outlets, and high-end power cords. The Adept Response handily outperformed my then-reference power conditioners, as well as any others I'd tried up that point. By the time I'd…
Robert J. Reina wrote about the Parasound Halo JC 3 in February 2012 (Vol.35 No.2):
I was intrigued by a sentence in Brian Damkroger's rave review of the Parasound Halo JC 3 phono preamplifier3 in the October 2011 issue: "The simplest way to describe the JC 3 is as a Vendetta SCP-2 [phono preamplifier] executed with integrated rather than discrete circuits." As I've used a Vendetta SCP-2 as my reference phono stage in my most expensive reference system for 22 years now, I thought it would be interesting to get a Halo JC 3 in-house and compare them—especially as both were designed by John…
Years ago, while editing Listener Magazine, I received a call from a record-company publicist with whom I was friendly: The drummer Ginger Baker, whose work I admire, was promoting a new release, and we were offered a 30-minute telephone interview with the artist. I jumped at the chance, but wound up leaving the article in the can—partly because it was so short, partly because its subject was so cranky. As with vacation trips to certain locales, second prize would likely have been 60 minutes with Ginger Baker.
I was reminded of that episode a few weeks ago, when a friend called to say he…
Stereo imaging was disappointing, making it easy to understand why serious audiophiles of the late 1970s and early '80s were so impressed with the spatially more precise (and, one could argue, timbrally more neutral) tube amplifiers being brought to market by Audio Research, Conrad-Johnson, Counterpoint, Quicksilver, and others. Although it produced an unusually large soundfield overall, the 8B, for its part, gave poor presence to such soloists as tenor Peter Pears, in the nice recording he made of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horns, and Strings (LP, Angel S-36788). That said, and for…
Sidebar: List of the Month
Last month's list was decidedly negative, so let's take a cheerier view this time out and consider those records whose musical brilliance has dribbled onto their jackets. Needless to say, there exist other great covers (the original cover of Blind Faith's studio album comes to mind), and similarly indispensable recordings abound (Martin Newell's The Greatest Living Englishman and the Du Pré/Barbirolli recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto top my list). But here are the ones of which I know that mate brilliance with brilliance, arranged from good to great:
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The taxonomy of audio products used to be easy. An amp, a preamp, speakers, a disc player or two—done. Now that hard drives, streaming clouds, and computers have entered the scene, unless your world revolves around only an iPod or a disc player, you have choices—lots of choices.
And so a new product type, along with dozens of subtypes, has emerged that helps you keep up with the incoming bits. I like to refer to this branch of the audio kingdom as digital "hubs." Think of a hub as the ultimate audio adapter: whatever you need to connect to or with, the hub makers try to have a port or…
However, there are quite a few apps, some of them free, that let you control your M1 CLiC-NAS library from an iPad, iPhone, etc (footnote 1). Using Linn's free Kinsky app on an iPad2, I now had a more complete touchscreen experience—not quite Sooloos easy, and still a major pain with a large library, but a night-and-day improvement over the M1 CLiC's screen and remote control. However, I found one Kwirk with Kinsky: The track-timing information of high-definition files with sample rates higher than 44kHz was multiplied by as much as four for 24/192 files.
Other than that Kuriosity,…