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Albums with such diverse provenance (three studios, three engineers, six ensembles) often lack aesthetic and sonic continuity. Not here. Diana Krall and engineer Al Schmitt mixed and sequenced these recordings from 2016 and 2017 into a memoir with a single emotional atmosphere. Krall's intimate voice is always the focus, telling secrets into your ear.…

Bartók's string quartets trace the composer's stylistic evolution from rhyth-mically fluid dissonance to a more aggressive, fragmented idiom, taking in musical gestures that, through overuse and in lesser hands, would later become new-music clichés. Interpretively, the Jerusalem Quartet has the full measure of these scores, pivoting across their tricky rhythmic scansions with assurance…

As I became familiar with audio measurements, it struck me that the equivalent of the skid pan test was…

Attending the two-day Making Vinyl Berlin B2B conference on May 2 and 3, 2019 was an obvious decision for me, even if Day 1's "Physical Media World Conference" panel discussion was more about optical digital media than it was about analog vinyl.

The two previous Making Vinyl Detroit conferences I'd participated in had been successful, well-attended events. This year, organizers Bryan Ekus and Larry Jaffee invited me to participate in a music journalist's panel discussion on Day 1 and then to run two vinyl-related panels on Day 2. The venue was the famous Hansa…

In the September 1988 issue of Stereophile, I wrote a rave review about the first speaker, the AE1, from what was to me a totally unknown English company, Acoustic Energy. Though tiny, and possessing an intrinsically limited low-frequency response, the $1500/pair AE1 was one of the most musical loudspeakers I have ever used, throwing a deep, beautifully defined soundstage, and possessed of a clean treble and a sweet, if rather…

Regarding measurements, I use a mixture of nearfield, in-room, and quasi-anechoic FFT techniques (using the MLSSA system from DRA Labs described elsewhere in this issue) to investigate objective factors that might explain the sound heard. The speakers' impedance phase and amplitude were measured using the magazine's Audio Precision System One.

The AE2's impedance curve (fig.1) reveals the port tuning to lie at 42Hz. The use of two 8 ohm woofers means that the minimum impedance drops to 4 ohms in the upper-bass/lower-midrange, though it remains above 6 ohms…

Description: Two-way, reflex-loaded, stand-mounted loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) metal-dome tweeter, two 4.5" (110mm) metal-cone woofers. Crossover frequency: 3kHz. Crossover slopes: 4th-order, 24dB/octave. Frequency response: 65Hz–18kHz ±2.5dB, 50Hz–22kHz ±4dB. Sensitivity: 91dB/W/m (2.83V). Nominal impedance: 8 ohms (5.5 ohms minimum at 50Hz and 250Hz, 16 ohms maximum at 27Hz). Harmonic distortion (no frequency specified): less than 0.05% of second and third harmonic at 90dB at 1m; less than 0.1% of second and third harmonic at 100dB at 1m. Power…

Amplifier designers have frequently looked for ways to marry the advantages of tubes to those of solid-state devices. Hybrid designs of various stripes have appeared over the years, most of them using tube input stages with transistor output stages, eliminating the major weaknesses of tube amplifiers: eg, they run hot, are unreliable in that tubes have a finite life, are more expensive than a similarly powerful solid-state design, and have power-hungry output tubes and output transformers.

Counterpoint Electronics has long been a…