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Without forethought, at every audio show I attend, I inevitably end up smiling, relaxed, and happy in the Gershman Acoustics room. Especially lately, when the always-cheerful Ofra Gershman is playing the $13k/pair Grand Avant Garde floor-standing loudspeakers. Each time I experience these elegantly shaped and beautifully crafted loudspeakers, I like them more. They play smooth but not soft. What I notice and like most about the Avant Gardes is how space and detail are expressed. Just right. Not too etched or hard. Not too blurred or soft. This just-rightness is what makes the speakers…
When I visited Pass Labs’ Nelson Pass at his Sea Ranch California hideaway, I was completely taken by his studio reference speakers; which, consisted of Cube Audio 8" F8 Magus full-range drivers mounted on an open vertical baffle. Mounted face down on a small horizontal baffle about 5" above the floor was a slot-loaded 15" Eminence woofer. The woofer was separated from the wide-open full-range driver by an LX Mini active crossover and driven by a First Watt F7 amplifier. I told Nelson I could retire a happy man with that system.
When I returned to Brooklyn, I went online and fell into…
I was never able to take a photo of Octave’s full system, because so many people were walking up to the equipment rack and Focal Scala speakers to ogle Octave’s new Jubilee 300B amplifier (54,000 Euros). (That’s what happens when you display in one of the big glass-entranced spaces surrounding three sides of the first floor Atriums in the MOC.) You’ll have to settle for this photo, taken of a static display on the other side of the room divider from the active system.
As explained by self-described “eternal music lover” Andreas Hoffmann, Octave’s owner and designer for over 30 years, all…
When Dynaudio’s Mike Manousselis told me that the new Dynaudio Confidence 30 ($20,000/pair) has a new Esotar3 tweeter, I thought of John Atkinson, who praised this company’s tweeters in a review some years back. The new tweeter includes a Hexis inner dome to help dissipate back wave energy and, as with all the other new drivers in the speaker, uses new “ultra-powerful” neodymium magnets.
Also new: a “horizon surround” on the Confidence 30’s midrange and downward-firing ports. “The baffle is completely inert,” Manousselis said; it’s composed of a “Compex” composite that is quieter than…
Pretty eye-catching, eh? Such was the class act from Göbel High End, who even brought their own room treatment panels to the show.
I initially sat in first row center of this room, but then CEO Oliver Göbel urged me to move a row back, where the sound was ideally coherent. We began with Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco de Lucia’s “Mediterranean Sunday / Rio Ancho” from the LP, Friday Night in San Francisco and moved on to an LP of the Bizet/Shchedrin Carmen Ballet Suite. In all cases, the system did an excellent job of conveying air around instruments and reverberation in the…
Audiophilia is nothing if not nostalgic—in fact, it's doubly so. Listening to recorded music is an act of looking back, often with the hope of re-creating some wistfully recalled wonder. On top of that, the zeal to perfect the playback experience, whether by means of better-quality recordings or better hardware, is far less common than it used to be among middle-class consumers. Although in recent years our pastime has surprised with its resilience, we're surely nearer the immolation scene than the Prelude to Act I.
Make that triply nostalgic: Some of us look back in longing not only at…
It's a toss-up: The house where my family and I lived for 15 years was bigger than the one we have now, and had a much nicer view. On the other hand, we now live in a less economically depressed region, as suggested by the relative scarcity of inflatable lawn decorations. During the last year I saw in my neighborhood far fewer leprechauns, reindeer, Easter Bunnies, purple-and-green Draculas, and turkeys wearing pilgrim hats (which makes about as much sense as Russian soldiers wearing lederhosen). I find those things unspeakably sad, because they're horrible, cheap, gaudy wastes of money.…
I returned to the Curzon-Knappertsbusch Beethoven and heard it played back with considerably more clarity and color than before, if still with less than the ultimate in both of those qualities—plus considerably less compression on dynamic peaks. And not only did the XM5's apparent musicality not suffer from the change, it flourished. Now that transition from second movement to third—a transition that Knappertsbusch engineers with great control and delicacy, as pizzicato strings punctuate a short phrase that points first toward B and then toward E-flat—was more brilliant than ever.
The…
But when I slid into place the four Orea Bordeaux feet—indeed, after two rounds of back-and-forth comparisons—I realized that the mandolin's tone was comparatively pinched with the original feet in place. With the IsoAcoustics Oreas, the mandolin seemed notably louder—especially in the opening measures, where it's the only instrument being played—and had more body and an altogether richer timbral character. Those banjos, played by Tony Trischka and Pete Wernick, still sounded of the barnyard, but were now more distinct from one another and from the sound of Wakefield's mandolin—the latter a…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Solid-state integrated amplifier. Analog inputs: 1 line-level with adjustable level (RCA), 1 line-level with fixed level (RCA), 1 MM phono (RCA). Digital inputs: 4 S/PDIF (2 BNC, 2 TosLink), 1 USB. Digital resolution: 16–24 bits, 32–192kHz (S/PDIF); 16–24 bits, 44.1–192kHz plus DSD64 (DoP) (USB). Preamplifier gain: 12dB. Preamplifier input impedance: 14k ohms (line-level, adjustable), 12k ohms (line-level, fixed), 47k ohms (phono). Preamplifier THD: 0.002% at 1kHz, 1V. Power amplifier: Output power (1kHz): 60Wpc into 8 ohms (17.8dBW). Frequency…