Simone was a gifted, aspiring classical pianist who graduated as valedictorian from an integrated private high school…
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By all accounts, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, aka Nina Simone, who passed in 2003, was a troubled person and a brilliant artist. Why she was not more acclaimed during her lifetime is a question several recent film projects have tried to answer. Did her fierce stand on civil rights lose her fans? Or was it, as the films have implied, a case of self-sabotage driven by mental illness? Whatever the answer, her inimitable work continues to resonate with ever more force and depth.
The late Ken Fritz discusses his legendary audio system, from the YouTube video One Man’s Dream
When Ken Fritz died, many people wondered what would become of his stereo system. Fritz's rig was the stuff of legend. The audiophile from Chesterfield, Virginia, had built much of it with his own hands, including line-array speakers too tall to fit in most people's homes. They took 5400 hours to complete and were appraised at more than $200,000. He also designed and built a three-arm turntable that sat on a unique 1500lb antivibration platform. Fritz felt that his "Frankentable" rivaled or…
All prices in are Canadian dollars.
Soltanus Acoustics from Hungary and Brooklyn Audio from Nova Scotia [corrected] served up a seductive system consisting of a pair of electrostatic Soltanus Acoustics ESL Virtuoso Mkll speakers ($24,999/pair), an Auralic Aries G2.2 streamer ($8199), an Auralic Vega G2.2 DAC ($10,699), a Zesto Audio Leto Ultra Mkll preamplifier ($15,580), a mono/stereo Hegel H30A amplifier ($23,995), and a Synergistic Research router ($3000). Filling out the system were a variety of AudioQuest cables (various prices), an AudioQuest Niagara 5000 power conditioner…
All prices are in Canadian dollars.
Hearken Audio always comes to the Toronto and Montreal Audiofests with a trove of gear, much of it exotic to me either because I've never heard of it or rarely see it anywhere else. It is invariably intriguing from a purist-artisinal standpoint and usually superlative sounding.
It was no different with this year's batch, which included a Reed Muse 1C friction belt drive turntable in Karelian birch ($22,600), equipped with a Reed 3p Macassar Ebony 10.5" tonearm ($7210) and Etsuro Urushi Gold cartridge ($17,500). On the electronics side of…
All prices listed are in Canadian dollars.
Audio Note exhibiting at the Montreal audio show? Nothing new. Audio Note exhibiting an all-Audio Note system? Again, nothing new. Audio Note speakers that are not placed in the corners and are on tall stands? That's out of the ordinary.
Yet there they were: the standmount, 90dB-sensitive (2.83V/1m), built-in-Austria AX-2/II speakers ($6000/pair), perched on either side of a system comprising a class-A, push-pull, 28Wpc EL34-based Cobra integrated amplifier with onboard DAC ($8000), a TT2 turntable / ARM One tonearm / IQ2 MM…
All prices listed in this post are in US dollars.
What can you get for $4750? A lot, apparently.
That was the retail price of the whole system set up in the Emotiva room. The system was all-Emotiva: a pair of Airmotiv XT3 loudspeakers ($1999/pr), a 550Wpc XPA-DR2 power amplifier ($1899), an XDA-3 DAC/preamp ($699), and a CMX-6+ AC line filter with surge protection ($199). Cables were also by Emotiva but are not included in the $4750 price. They don’t add much to the price, however.
This may have been my biggest surprise of the show. The sound I heard didn't sound "…
Ever notice that the language we use to talk about sound can be pretty aggressive? Reviewers often write about amplifiers "taking control" of a speaker, possibly "ironfisted control," especially if the amplifier in question happens to be a "juggernaut." In this particular linguistic trash fire, we also find "razor-sharp transients," "hair-raising dynamics," and that ickiest of descriptors, "bass slam." If words could smell like hair gel and drugstore cologne, these might.
All this verbiage is describing brute force, which we might use to push open a heavy door. But there's another kind of…
In subsequent listening sessions, what stayed with me most was the remarkable coherence the EM/IA brought to my system. While there was a slight reduction in the first kind of force—sheer grunt and propulsion—there was a notable increase in the second: Music sounded more natural, present, and intentional, less like a collection of sounds and more like a real performance. And the EM/IA more consistently drew my attention to the music rather than the sound, always a wonderful development. It turns out that getting this kind of genuinely inspiring performance out of the EM/IA is dependent on…
All prices in Canadian dollars.
If the AudioNec Evo 3 speakers ($125,000/pair) in the top photo look familiar, it's no accident. They're from the same company that made the Evo 1 speakers in my last Luna Cables / Thöress report. But this time, they have three more modules, so the Evo 3 is much taller than the Evo 1.
This was a high-level sounding system. It should be because of the exclusivity of its components. These included a Nagra Reference Anniversary turntable ($232,500) with a Nagra Reference MC cartridge ($24,500). Also, a tube, class-A Nagra HD phono stage ($115,000), a…
When I first got interested in audio in the UK, in the 1960s, four English brands dominated the domestic loudspeaker scene: Goodmans (founded in 1923), Celestion (whose first loudspeaker was launched in early 1925), Tannoy (which started making loudspeakers in 1928), and Wharfedale. Wharfedale was the youngest of these brands, founded in 1932 in Yorkshire—the land of the Dales—by Gilbert Briggs.
In 1968, following some failed experiments with home-brewed speakers, I was looking to buy a pair of "real" loudspeakers. I was attracted to the large Wharfedale Dovedale, with its 12" woofer, but…