It is an essential rule of thumb when judging hi-fi equipment that the better component is one that opens your ears to new music. A sign that you have made a worthwhile improvement in your hi-fi system, therefore, is when you find yourself buying more records and CDs, spending more time seeking out garage sales for discarded LP collections, or browsing the aisles in that increasingly hard-to-find specialist record store. But even as you feed your recorded music…
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"Phonograph, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises."—Ambrose Bierce (in The Devils's Dictionary, Dover, 1958)
This is particularly true now that the Billboard Hot 100 is compiled from radio playlists as well as from sales figures (footnote 6). Songs are now played on the radio largely because they are played on the radio. This may make it easier for record company executives to sleep at night, but it has turned a healthily divergent situation into one that is artistically and commercially convergent.
Classical music appears to be in not much better shape. Frank Zappa recently stated that a composer who wishes to be performed can no longer "just sit down and write because you know how to write…
Watching the Beatles Anthology TV shows last Thanksgiving, I was struck by how good recorded sound quality was in the early to mid-1960s and how bad it had become by the era of Let It Be. Early Beatles recordings may have been primitive in terms of production, but their basic sound quality was excellent, with extended response at the frequency extremes and a natural, clean-sounding midrange. Late Beatles recordings lacked highs and dynamic range, and sounded grainy by comparison. This was partly because, by 1969–70, studios had replaced their simple tubed mixing consoles with the first…
A letter in response appeared in March 1996 (Vol.19. No.3):
Beatles recordings
Editor: I just read JA's "Nothing is real" column in the January 1996 Stereophile. I feel that he tried to apply preconceived ideas to a situation that doesn't support them—that in the case of Beatles recordings, solid-state technology and analog-tape-track width degraded audio quality.
In preparation for criticizing the later Beatles recordings, he praised early Beatles recordings for their basic sound quality, noting their extended response at the frequency extremes. True, the highs were there…
Over the past two decades, enough advances in the high-end audio industry have trickled down to aspiring audiophiles that we now enjoy a level of high-value, high-resolution performance that would have seemed unattainable even just a few years ago. Still, immersion in a profound musical experience remains an ephemeral goal to potential converts, given the level of expertise that seems necessary to assemble a truly audiophile set of separates.
Now you and me, at the center of whose beings is the experience of music—we'll scheme and save to achieve our sonic dreams. But there are those for…
The Linn's back panel, with its Aux, Tape In/Record Out, and Preamp Out connections, offers a welcome wink and nod to those of us who still archive extensive collections of cassette tapes. On the far right are more love-me/love-my-dog details: two sets of speaker outputs employing Linn/Deltron connectors, which, in accordance with EU requirements, don't expose any bare metal surfaces. "These are plastic with a brass post in the center that holds the core of the cable very tightly," Brian Morris explains. Obviously, if you purchase this unit from a Linn dealer, they can attach Linn/Deltron…
Needless to say, the people at Linn were none too pleased. When their digital main man, Alan Clark, looked into it, he discovered that "Initial units of the new Classik with tuner had an incorrect resistor value fitted. This resistor is part of a network that determines the output voltage of a voltage regulator—the one that supplies the servo drivers. The device is specified to operate with a supply between 3V and 18V. The initial value we designed in was 10V, but in our opinion the device runs too hot and in the previous two units its internal temperature cutoff would have been enabled. The…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Remote-controlled CD receiver with clock, AM/FM tuner section, MOSFET output stage, three line-level inputs, (Aux, Tape In, Tape In) and three line-level outputs (Rec Out, Preamp Out, Headphones). User-programmable functions: Clock, Alarm, Timer (all with automatic switch-on/off). Tuner section: 80 user-definable presets. Tuning resolution: FM Mode. CD-player section: triple-beam laser, delta-sigma conversion. Amplifier Section: Power output: 75Wpc into 4 ohms (15.75dBW), nominal mains. Voltage gain: 28.5dB. Preamplifier output impedance: 100 ohms (…
Sidebar 2: Measurements: CD Section
Fed a full-scale CD sinewave, the Linn Classik power amplifier clipped with its volume control set at "81" out of a possible 100 settings, this equivalent to an attenuation of 13dB for external sources. All measurements of the CD section were therefore done at the Preamplifier Out jacks with the volume set at "80," at which value the level was 814mV. This suggests that outboard amplifiers used with the Classik need a higher-than-usual sensitivity. The preamp outputs didn't invert signal polarity, and had a source impedance of 146 ohms over most of the…
To generate fig.4, the CD section decoded data representing a dithered 500Hz tone that faded down to zero from -60dBFS. The level of the analog output was measured with a narrow-bandpass filter centered on 500Hz. An increasingly positive amplitude error develops below -75dBFS and plateaus at +6dB at -95dBFS, meaning that tones are twice the level they should be. Noise starts to dominate the measured level below about -100dBFS, and obscures the waveform of an undithered 1kHz tone at -90.31dBFS (fig.5).
Fig.4 Linn Classik, left-channel departure from linearity, 16-bit data (2dB/…