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Another room where the sound warmed the cockles of my heart was hosted by Gershman Acoustics, Krell, and VPI. There, I re-met Gershman Acoustics' Ofrah and Eli Gershman (in the photo above), whom I see regularly at the Montreal Audio Fest—is there a harder working husband-and-wife team working the audio show circuit?—and had the pleasure to meet for the first time Krell's congenial COO Walter Schofield. The gang (minus VPI's Mat Weisfeld, who's often in the picture but wasn't this time) was demoing a system that was another of my show highlights. The players: VPI HW40 Anniversary turntable…
So: What did I think of the Toronto show? I thought it was great, comparable to the Montreal show in spirit and crowd buzz, though traffic did seem thin on Sunday compared to the previous two days. But that's not unusual for an audio show.
I'll say this, unequivocally: The Toronto Westin Airport Hotel is a fantastic venue for an audio event, better than the Montreal show's near-fabled Bonaventure Hotel, where it counts most: in the exhibitors' rooms. For whatever reason, and this was the consensus among those I spoke with, the rooms at the Westin seem to have acoustic properties that made…
"Let's get real, real gone for a change."—Elvis
I.
As Plato mentioned in The Sophist and thousands of art historians have noted in the years since, Greek sculptors distorted the human figure by enlarging the head and shoulders. They did it on purpose. If they didn't, when viewed from below, it would look wrong. Poets—real ones, I mean—distort smaller truths in order to create larger ones. Every type of musical temperament is a means of distorting the relative sizes of sub-octave intervals—or, in fixed-pitch instruments, creating compromises—in order to create a pleasing result. Human…
In that same Recommended Components feature, we listed a total of 41 turntables; four of them are suspended-subchassis designs, and two of those—the Linn LP12 and the Oracle Delphi—were first introduced in the 1970s. Of that I can only declare my belief that there exist good-sounding, musically satisfying examples of virtually every sort of turntable in existence, and that suspended-subchassis designs are no exception. Different examples of suspended-subchassis turntables can excel at very different aspects of musical playback. (The Linn, for example, remains a momentum-and-flow champion.)…
Art Dudley returned to the Air Tight ATM-300R in November 2019 (Vol.42 No.11):
Nine months ago, while I was busy reviewing Axiss Audio's Air Tight ATM-300R single-ended power amp ($16,995 with Electro-Harmonix output tubes), my new old house was still new to me, and I hadn't succeeded at getting my 1966 Altec Flamenco loudspeakers to sound consistently good in its 11' by 16' living room. So before I made my listening notes on the Air Tight, I banished my Altecs to the garage—temporarily, of course, until such time as I knew how to get them to sing in their new setting—and relied instead…
About a year after settling into my new house, I decided to buy a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 10 floorstanding loudspeakers, which I had reviewed in 2014 for our sister publication Sound & Vision. I wound up buying three of them, with the intention of cannibalizing the drivers and crossover from one to make my own three-way center-channel speaker. But that project was long delayed, and I never got around to doing anything with the third Silver 10: It now sits in a closet as a spare. (The similar but smaller Silver 8 and its replacement, the new Silver 300, were both reviewed for…
The speakers were single-wired, and the spikes weren't used. (The speakers sat on a large rug but with hardware floors underneath.) The provided grilles remained in the shipping boxes. All the source material was from CD.
Listening
Pomp & Pipes, a 1994 Reference Recordings disc (CD, RR-58CD) recorded by Keith Johnson at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, combines that hall's powerful organ with the Dallas Wind Symphony conducted by the legendary Frederick Fennell. It includes a range of showpieces with astonishing dynamic range. They're not all gems, but the closing number,…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, floorstanding, reflex-loaded loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25.4mm) MPD tweeter, 2.5" (63.5mm) C-CAMcone midrange unit, two 8" (203mm) RDT II woofers. Crossover frequencies: 650Hz, 3kHz. Frequency response: 30Hz–50kHz, –6dB. Sensitivity: 90dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 4 ohms. Minimum impedance: 3.5 ohms at 1kHz. Power handling: 250W (RMS). Recommended amplifier power: 100–250W. Maximum spl: 117dBA (pair).
Dimensions: (including feet and spikes): 42.1" (1069.3mm) H by 12.9" (327.7mm) W by 16.5" (419.1mm) D. Weight: 67.25lb (30.5kg).
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Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Source: Marantz UD7007 universal disc player.
Preamplifier: Marantz AV8805 preamp-processor.
Power Amplifier: Parasound Halo A 52+.
Cables: Kimber AGDL (coaxial digital from source to AV8805), Cardas Hexlink (preamps to power amp), QED Silver Anniversary XT speaker cable, generic IEC power cords.—Thomas J. Norton
Sidebar 3: In-Room Measurements
The following measurements were made at a single mike position at ear height (for a seated listener) using the OmniMic measurement system from Parts Express. Averaging multiple readings around the listening position has not been shown to offer more revealing results in my room than a single reading point, apart from smoothing out some minor ripples in the graph. All the graphs here were smoothed to 1/6th octave. While these results will not be as precise as those made with the tools used for our full suite of measurements (which dial out the effects of the…