My only criticism of the Feliks Arioso was: It never took acid and rolled naked in the Woodstock mud. It played even the raunchiest 1920s blues wearing a crisply pressed Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt.
The Western Electric 300B
The Western Electric Company was founded in 1869 as a pioneering electrical engineering and manufacturing operation hoping to become a leader in the dawning electrical age…
A great concept—sound enough to serve as the foundation for an independent democratic nation.
Yet what's sound in one sphere doesn't necessarily apply to sound in another, namely the rooms in which our systems reside. As much as we audiophiles may wish to declare our independence from room resonances, image smearing from first-order reflections, slap echo, and every other environmental and speaker-related factor that can handicap system performance, no mere declaration will make it so. Not all rooms—and not…
The result
After I'd created my first curves, I put on Rickie Lee Jones's…
Description: Digital Voicing Equalizer with remote control. Analog inputs: 1 pair single-ended (RCA), 1 pair balanced (XLR). Outputs: 1 pair single-ended (RCA), 1 pair balanced (XLR). Digital inputs/outputs: 1 HS-Link (for Accuphase products; samples up to DSD 5.8MHz and PCM 32/384), 1 coaxial (samples up to PCM 24/192); 1 optical (samples up to PCM 24/96). USB 2.0/3.0 port for graphic storage only. Gain: +12dB to –90dB, variable. Analog input maximum level: 0.89V at +6dB gain, 1.78V at 0dB gain, 3.55V at –6dB gain. THD+noise, 20Hz–20kHz: 0.0007%. Frequency…
Digital sources: dCS Rossini SACD/CD transport, Rossini DAC, and Rossini Clock; EMM Labs DV2 Integrated DAC; Synology 5-bay NAS 1019+; Roon Nucleus+ music server with HDPlex 200 linear power supply; Uptone Audio etherRegen, Small Green Computer Sonore opticalModule, TP-Link gigabit Ethernet media converters plus multimode duplex fiberoptic cable (2), Linksys routers (2); Small Green Computer linear power supply & Small Green Computer/ HDPlex four-component, 200W linear power supply (3); external hard drives, SSD USB sticks, iPad Pro; Apple 2017 Macbook…
The Accuphase DG-68 is a complicated product, comprising an analog–digital converter (ADC), digital signal processing (DSP), and a digital–analog converter (DAC). It also has digital inputs and outputs that bypass the ADC and DAC stages. JVS used it as a complete analog–analog processor, so, in addition to examining the individual performance of the ADC, DSP, and DAC stages, I looked at its behavior as set by JVS.
I used my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It") to perform the measurements, repeating some tests with the…
Jason Victor Serinus's first impressions of this $17,000 tubed preamplifier (footnote 1) in Stereophile's November 2020 issue were very positive: "Am I really getting paid to do this?," he wrote, calling it "some of the most polished, transparent, and arresting sound I'd heard from my system." But as his auditioning resumed after a break of a few days, he discovered that the REF 6SE sounded very different than it had a few days earlier. "Much of the tonal beauty that had momentarily caused me to hold…
I've long felt no need for a power conditioner. When we moved to our current house, back in 1995, on the advice of a fellow audiophile I had an electrician install hospital-grade outlets, wired to a discrete 20-amp circuit for all my audio gear. It was the most cost-effective improvement to my system that I've ever made, and I would advise anyone to take this step before doing anything else to treat your AC power.
Over the years, I've tried a few devices to cleanse the dirt that ConEd was zapping…
dCS Puccini CD player, VPI Classic turntable, Mobile Fidelity record clamp, Ortofon Cadenza Black cartridge, PS Audio Stellar phono preamp, Simaudio Moon 740P line-stage preamp, Simaudio Moon 860A power amp, Revel Ultima Studio 2 speakers, AudioQuest Wild Blue Yonder and Nirvana S-X Ltd. interconnects, AudioQuest Robin Hood speaker cable, AudioQuest Hurricane power cords (AQ Thunder power cord for the Niagara 3000), Audiodesksysteme Vinyl Cleaner Pro record-cleaning machine.—Fred Kaplan
In his November 2020 review, Jason Victor Serinus found that Audio Research's REF 6SE tubed preamplifier $17,000 was very sensitive to system tuning. John Atkinson took a listen to the REF 6SE and compared it with three topnotch preamplifiers: the MBL N11 ($14,600), the Pass Labs XP-32 ($17,500), and the Benchmark LA4 ($2599). He decided that the Audio Research was indeed a…