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Another heavy hitter, showing in five rooms with multiple product lines, was Rob Standley’s Playback Distribution, featuring equipment from TEAC, the new-to-me company Advance Paris, PMC, Amphion, Vienna Acoustics, and a heaping helping of Esoteric.

Playback’s room 1004 featured no fewer than five US debuts. The front end and amplification was all Esoteric: the K-1X SE SACD Player/DAC ($38,000), the N-01XD SE Network Player/DAC ($22,000), the Grandioso C1X preamplifier ($46,000), and the S-1X Class A stereo amplifier ($32,000). All new!

Loudspeakers were the new Vienna…

Phono playback EQ is one of those audiophile topics that stokes some people's passions, with plenty of disagreements about how important it is. I have seen grown men get into heated…

Typically, moving magnet inputs are comparatively simple, with fixed gain, a fixed 47k ohm load, and perhaps, on the fancier ones, a capacitive loading option. Japanese manufacturers have traditionally taken moving magnet cartridges more seriously, offering a wider range of moving magnet input options. For example, the Luxman EQ-500, reviewed by Art Dudley in 2016, has just two settings for the moving coil input but a host of adjustments for moving magnet cartridges. The Lupe follows this lead, with five moving magnet resistance loads, from 18k ohms to 120k ohms, eight capacitive loads,…

RIAA Curves were discussed in detail in Keith Howard's 2009 Stereophile article "Cut and Thrust: RIAA LP Equalization."

In an ideal world, lacquer cutting would be done such that all frequencies take up the same amount of space. That way, all the grooves could be made to be an optimal size so that neither lows nor highs suffer from avoidable cutting-induced distortion—hence the idea of reducing bass and increasing the treble when the record is cut.

Like most (but not all) phono cartridges, a cutter head is a…

The room of Tampa-area dealer, UniQue Home Audio was hosted by Michael Swek and offered unique gear and interesting sounds. Their products included the MoFi Ultradeck turntable ($2499) with an Ultragold MC cartridge ($1495) feeding a Coda 06X FET phono preamplifier ($6000). Digital audio was handled with a HiFi Rose RS-130 Network Transport ($5195).

Also in the room was Theoretica Applied Physics's innovative BAACH-SP III Adio Stereo Purifier ($26,800), "for Virtual Reality 3D Imaging," boasted the room banner.

The remaining components included an IsoTek V5 Polaris Power…

Just Audio's Lenny Florentine presented two rooms at the show, one jammed with components at all price points (including Luxman, inspiring that company's VP of Sales John Pravel and myself to reminisce about 1970s hi-fi sales), the second with more affordable but no less listenable alternatives. Room 806 offered two systems in one.

System One consisted of three Audiolab components—a 9000CDT CD Transport ($1499), a 9000N Wireless Audio Streaming Player ($3499)—and a 9000A integrated amplifier ($2999), the latter helping a pair of Mission 770 loudspeakers ($5000/pair) push out…

With a slightly worried look, he asked, "How much did you say those silver cables cost?"

Thirty years later
Changing audio cables always changes the sound of my system, sometimes a lot but usually just a little. Typically, the sonic effects of cable changes are modest shifts in…

With HiFiMan HE R10P: When I played Stravinsky: Histoire du soldat (version française) (24/96 FLAC, Harmonia Mundi/Qobuz) through the Lina, powering HiFiMan's $5499 HE R10P closed-back headphones, I felt as though I was listening to a live French radio drama ca 1920. Isabelle Faust's violin, Alexander Melnikov's piano, and Dominique Horwitz's narration were presented as if each had their own recording track and those tracks were skillfully combined into an engrossing, faux-live mix, well-suited to headphones. The sound was sharp, lucid, and emotionally affecting in a way that made me…

The French two-way Diptyque DP140 MKII loudspeaker ($17,000/pair) challenges the preconception that planar magnetic speakers struggle to put out deep bass: It's specified to reach down to 35Hz. Its 87dB/W/m sensitivity is merely average—it will benefit from some power—but its 6 ohm nominal impedance means it's not too heavy a load.

The sound quality of this system was outstanding. Its planar-magnetic mid/bass driver and ribbon tweeter operate in seamless harmony. There's a loss of deep bass output with any open baffle dipole design, but this can be compensated, and it's offset by…

In the conclusion to my K-300i review, I wrote, "The Krell ... has…