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The closest I've come to airing my thoughts about live vs recorded music was in the "As We See It" of the December 2005 Stereophile, "Resistance Is Futile," in which I put as many miles between the two as I could. I described live performances as works of art that exist only at the time and place of their making, variables from which their ultimate impact can never be separated; and music recordings as works of art in their own right, albeit ones that require a great deal more from the listener in order to succeed to their fullest. People respond more positively to live music not because it…
"After all this work on our mastering gear," Pete Hutchison said, "then I thought, What about the artwork? Most companies just get a clean copy of the original, scan it, and off they go. I chose to go back to the 1950s printing technique, letterpress, where each letter is an individual piece of type. So we rewrote all of the sleeve notes [to that purpose]. The card stock is all bespoke: I was rejecting a lot of stuff, a lot of card—and a lot of finished sleeves."
The cream-colored jackets for the three LPs that comprise Martzy's Bach recordings have the precise look and feel of British…
Sidebar: List of the Month
Stink on Paper: 10 Awful Books about Music.
Donovan Leitch: Hurdy-Gurdy Man. The innocence of his music makes the self-inflation in Donovan's autobiography all the more jarring.
Stephen Davis: The Hammer of the Gods. An entertaining examination of Led Zeppelin, but apparently without basis in fact.
Robert Christgau: Grown Up All Wrong. An unwitting parody of the self-consciously hip rock critic at his worst.
Philip Hart: Fritz Reiner: A Biography. A sinfully dull, unrevealing book about a giant of 20th-century music.
Geoffrey…
Late last year, when I first heard of the Music Hall Marimba, I was happily surprised: One of my favorite hi-fi manufacturers had finally introduced its first and (so far) only loudspeaker—and it was seriously affordable at $349/pair. I wanted to review the Marimbas right away, but grumpy old Sam Tellig beat me to them (see our December 2012 issue). My first chance to hear the Marimbas came last October, at the 2012 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, where they highlighted a refreshingly small and simple system comprising Music Hall's MMF-5.1SE turntable with Cruise Control 2.0 power supply, and a…
Real music
The Marimbas sounded fine right out of the box and placed exactly where the PSB Alpha B1s had been, in their cat- and girlfriend-approved locations: on 24"-tall stands, the centers of their woofers 37" from my room's front wall, 96" from my listening position, and about 48" from the sidewalls. But I quickly found that the Marimbas would also respond well to more extreme placement scenarios, delivering a wider, deeper soundstage, with no apparent loss in bass impact or image focus, as I brought them closer to the listening position. I found the best results with the Marimbas…
The Marimbas sounded fine right out of the box and placed exactly where the PSB Alpha B1s had been, in their cat- and girlfriend-approved locations: on 24"-tall stands, the centers of their woofers 37" from my room's front wall, 96" from my listening position, and about 48" from the sidewalls. But I quickly found that the Marimbas would also respond well to more extreme placement scenarios, delivering a wider, deeper soundstage, with no apparent loss in bass impact or image focus, as I brought them closer to the listening position. I found the best results with the Marimbas…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, reflex-loaded stand-mounted loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" silk-dome tweeter, 5¼" polypropylene-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: 2.6kHz. Frequency range: 50Hz–35kHz. Impedance: 6 ohms. Sensitivity: 87dB/W/m.
Dimensions: 10.9" (279mm) H by 6.5" (167mm) W by 8.6" (221mm) D. Weight: 8.6 lbs each (3.9kg).
Serial number of review samples: 201206 1364.
Price: $349/pair.
Manufacturer: Music Hall, 108 Station Road, Great Neck, NY 11023. Tel: (516) 487-3663. Web: www.musichallaudio.com
Sidebar 2: Review System
I began my serious listening with the Marimbas mated to PSB's SubSeries 1 subwoofer and driven by NAD's C316 BEE integrated amplifier. I played mostly CDs using NAD's recently discontinued C515 BEE CD player. (A sample of the replacement model, the C516 BEE, arrived at our office in late February; look for my review sometime this summer.) Lengths of Kimber Kable 8VS speaker cable connected amp to sub, while longer runs of QED X-Tube 400 Signature connected sub to speakers; interconnects were Kimber PBJ.—Stephen Mejias
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Both Sam Tellig ("Sam's Space," December 2012) and Stephen Mejias ("The Entry Level," June 2013) enthused over the price/performance ratio offered by Music Hall's Marimba bookshelf loudspeaker. Sam concluded that the Marimba was "an astonishing little speaker, as long as you don't expect it to do much." Stephen, too, was impressed by the Marimbas' startling imaging capabilities, and found the bass to be impressively tight, tuneful, and fast. With this consensus from the oldest and youngest of Stereophile's writers, I decided to run the Marimba through my speaker…
I often receive letters from Stereophile readers. I've even gotten a few letters from female readers, one an attractive young lover of tube gear who sent me a picture of herself and [sigh] her boyfriend. But most are from people who are either thanking me for a specific review that resulted in a purchase and a satisfied buyer, or are suggesting products they'd like me to review. I frequently take the advice of writers of this second category; in fact, two of the inexpensive speakers I'll review in the next year were recommended by readers.
Only twice have I gotten a series of negative…
I expected a bookshelf speaker this small to sound a bit bass shy in my larger (15' by 35' by 11') listening room, but I never felt it did. Charlie Haden's double bass, on his and Denny Zeitlin's Time Remembers One Time Once (CD, ECM 1239), was woody and airy, with excellent senses of weight and drama and no trace of coloration. Electronic bass, too, fared well. The bass synthesizers in Björk's Homogenic (CD, Elektra 62061-2) and the Sade recording were round, deep, and dynamic, and their interaction with the electronic percussion was crisp and clean. However, don't expect miracles of bass…