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When I was in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, visiting D+M’s Euro HQ, I shot a few video clips to accompany my written account in hopes of providing readers with an additional experiential view of my time there.
John Atkinson wrote about the King in January 2017 (Vol.40 No.1):
Toward the end of my time auditioning Audeze's superb-sounding LCD-4 headphones, which I reviewed in the July 2016 issue, I briefly tried a sample of Audeze's new The King headphone amplifier (serial no. K3301003, footnote 1). Herb Reichert had expressed interest in reviewing the King, and before I drove it over to his Bed-Stuy bothy, I examined its test-bench performance with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It"), using unbalanced signals. (Though a pair of XLR jacks is available for input…
Manufacturer's Comment
Editor: Thanks to Stereophile for bringing the joy of headphone listening to its audience. We deeply appreciate Herb Reichert's review of the Audeze LCD-4 and The King headphone amplifier in the December issue, along with John Atkinson's Follow-Up measurements in this issue. Herb: "I can enthusiastically declare that Audeze's The King is one of the two or three best all-around headphone amps I have heard. . . . and by all audiophile measures, the LCD-4s must be rated Class A, superb, the state of the art."
Regarding the measurements, The King headphone…
This week's industry profile tells a story about beginnings and changing times, in a conversation with Steve Cohen, a longtime employee (he doesn't have a formal job title) of the New York based hi-fi shop In Living Stereo. I started our conversation by asking Steve how he got into hi-fi. What was his background?
Steve Cohen: My dad was into music, and getting a good hi-fi system to listen to was a project that we got to witness as kids. He went through a brief phase of buying equipment until he assembled his hi-fi system. He'd drive us to Lafayette Radio, an electronics store where the…
Photos: Daryl Wilson except where indicated
On December 8, 12 days before an embargo on the news was lifted, I visited Wilson Audio in Utah. The occasion was the launch of the WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeaker. Given its limited-edition production run (70 pairs), oversized dimensions (approximately 86" H with spikes x 26" W x 36.5" D), and high price ($685,000/pair), Wilson Audio's ultimate speaker is not slated for dealer and audio show demos. Instead, the only way prospective customers, dealers, and select press can experience Dave Wilson's magnum opus—the culmination of well over…
Bang & Olufsen's BeoLab 90 is not a loudspeaker to take on lightly. Though its size—49.33" high by 28.9" wide by 29.4" deep—and weight (302 lbs each) meant a major disruption of my listening room, which is also our living room, my wife assented. Its price of $84,990/pair puts it far beyond anything I might consider buying—and the complexity of the BeoLab 90, which has its own dedicated amplifiers and DACs, makes it impossible for a reviewer—or consumer—to directly compare it with any other loudspeaker. So be it.
Ever since I returned from visiting Bang & Olufsen's factory in…
I spent that first evening listening to the BeoLabs before any room equalization, but there's no reason to dwell on that. First, without EQ, the sound was more a product of my room than was intended. Second, there's no good reason to run a DSP-based system such as the BeoLab 90 without EQ. To do so would be equivalent to never using the top gears of a powerful car. EQ has been included in the speaker to provide the best quality of sound from it; you don't need to add an accessory—and you've paid for it!
Setup, Part 2
The next morning, having spent the previous evening listening to…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Remote-controlled, powered, three-way, 18-driver, floorstanding, sealed-box loudspeaker with Beam Width Control, Beam Direction Control, and Active Room Compensation. Drive-units (all ScanSpeak): seven 1.18" (30mm) Illuminator tweeters, seven 3.39" (86mm) Illuminator midrange units, three 8.3" (212mm) Discovery woofers, one 10.25" (260mm) Revelator woofer (front). Crossover frequencies: vary with driver and Beam Width setting. Power amplifiers: 14 B&O ICEpower AM300-X, tweeter & midrange drivers; four Heliox AM100-1, woofers. DSP: 2 Analog…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Oppo Digital BDP-105 universal BD player, Baetis XR3 PC-based music server, exaSound e28 II multichannel D/A processor, QNAP TS569L NAS.
Preamplifiers: Audio Research MP1, Parasound Halo P 7.
Cables: Interconnect (analog): AudioQuest Earth/DBS balanced. Interconnect (digital): Corning Optical USB 3, Shunyata Research E-Tron Anaconda BNC/RCA S/PDIF, Peachtree X1 USB-to-S/PDIF converter, UpTone Audio USB ReGen. AC: AudioQuest NRG-10, JPS Aluminata, Kubala-Sosna Emotion.
Accessories: Environmental Potentials EP-2450 power…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
The BeoLab 90 is so massive that, rather than having it shipped to my home, I traveled to Kal Rubinson's place to take some measurements. I used SMUGSoftware's Fuzzmeasure 3 app running on my MacBook Pro, along with an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone and a FireWire-connected Metric Halo ULN-2, which combines a low-noise microphone preamplifier with A/D and D/A converters. (These were set to a sample rate of 96kHz for the measurements and I fed Fuzzmeasure's analog signal to the Master loudspeaker where it was converted at 192kHz.)
First of all, as KR…