I was a slow starter with digital because of my early take on CD sound: It was emotionally drained with grumbling distortions in the bass and an off-timbre midrange, crowned by a thin, artificial treble, and penetrated by an eerie, unnatural silence whenever the musicians stopped playing. I thought cassettes had higher fidelity and that CDs would be a passing fad,…
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It's the late 1980s, and I'm soldering tube amplifiers on a plywood bench. I decide on a whim that it's time to break down and buy a CD player to supplement the Dynaco tuner and Dual cassette deck in my workroom music system.
TEAC's new transport looked expensive and pro-style cool on my rack. I liked its clearly labeled old school power toggle; it felt solid and direct-acting, as did all the front panel buttons. Aesthetics-wise, the VRDS-701T looked rugged enough for a recording studio and suave-fashionable enough for a domestic setting.
The top plate is extraordinarily thick, beautifully machined, and snug-fitting. The side panels look like thick heatsinks. The inside looks as serious as the outside, with two toroidal transformers, one for the CD mechanism and the other for the digital control…
Meeting up at High End Munich: Grover Neville (left), a contributor to Stereophile's late headphone blog InnerFidelity, with his dad, Craig, a civil engineer from Chicago.
"Schwabing isn't a neighborhood, but a state of being," declared the Countess Fanny zu Reventlow, an early feminist who scandalized German society by parenting out of wedlock, carrying a revolver, and practicing what today tends to be called ethical nonmonogamy. Thomas Mann described the fellow denizens of this northern corner of Munich as "the most singular, the most delicate, the boldest exotic plants." At the turn of…
Martion Audiosysteme Aeonors.
The most compelling sound I heard at High End Munich wasn't technically at High End Munich but rather at an industrial building across the street from the MOC. That's where Heinrich Amand Basilius Martion of Berlin's Martion Audiosysteme was demonstrating his new Aeonor speakers: a pair of concentrically mounted spherical treble and midrange horns resting on a corner-loaded wooden cabinet containing an 18" woofer, with driver time alignment achieved using DSP, driven by three pairs of custom class-A solid state amps. The price of this system, amps…
One of the pleasures of reviewing—and also using—products from Pass Laboratories is an encounter with Nelson Pass's writing, which can usually be found in the owner's manual and is always competent, insightful, and sometimes funny. How often do you get real pleasure and insight from reading an owner's manual?
Pass Labs has a lot of owner's manuals online. Reading through one, I encountered the following passage; you'll find the same or similar language in other manuals and on the Pass Labs website. I present it not only because I admire it and agree with the philosophy it expresses but…
Setup
Apart from cartridge setup—details of which go beyond the scope of this review—preparation was straightforward. I simply inserted the XP-27 in my reference system, keeping everything else the same. Like many manufacturers of multichassis components, Pass Labs prefer that the chassis not be stacked, lest noise from the power supply get picked up by the signal chassis. "The transformers are shielded and very quiet," Pass's Desmond Harrington told me in an email, "but there is a lot of gain in the XP-27, so best to keep the transformers away." I didn't stack them, mainly because…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-chassis, balanced phono preamplifier with dual inputs and front-panel gain and loading settings. Inputs: Balanced (XLR) and unbalanced (RCA). Balanced-mode gain: 53dB, 66dB, 76dB; 6dB less at single-ended output. RIAA accuracy: 20–20kHz, ±0.1dB. THD: <0.005% at 1mV MC input, <0.002% at 10mV MM input. Maximum output voltage: 22V RMS. Output impedance: 150 ohms balanced, 150 ohms single-ended. Input capacitance, adjustable 100pF–750pF on either input. Input resistance: 30 ohms–47k ohms on either input. Unweighted noise: –93dB ref. 10mV (MM…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog sources: SME 30/12 (original version) with Series V-12 tonearm. Phono cartridges: Ortofon Windfeld Ti, Ortofon Verismo; Lyra Etna λ Lambda.
Preamplification: Line: Pass Laboratories XP-32, CH Precision L1. Phono: Sutherland Big Loco.
Power amplifiers: Pass Laboratories XA60.8 monoblocks, CH Precision M1.1, Burmester 216.
Loudspeakers: Wilson Audio Specialties Alexx V.
Cables: Digital: AudioQuest Carbon, Cinnamon, & Coffee USB; CAD USB; Wireworld Platinum Starlight 8 Ethernet. Interconnect: AudioQuest ThunderBird (XLR and…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I measured the Pass Labs XP-27 phono preamplifier with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system, repeating some tests with the magazine's higher-resolution APx500 analyzer. To minimize noise, I connected a wire from the grounding terminal on the preamplifier chassis's rear panel to the analyzer ground connections. The XP-27 gets warm. The temperature of the top panel after an hour of testing was 99.5°F (37.5°C).
The inputs preserved absolute polarity from both the balanced and single-ended outputs. The gain from the balanced outputs was fairly close to the numeric…
Ah, Denmark. Land of the Vikings and blue-eyed, blond-haired folk with faces sculpted just so. I loved my week there as a Stereophile correspondent and member of a scraggly scrum of audio journalists whisked to DALI headquarters on a promotional junket.
Aside from its universal attractiveness, what struck me during my stay in the southernmost and smallest of the Scandinavian countries was how by North American standards the more densely populated cities I visited, Copenhagen and Aarhus, seemed orderly and clean. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists kept tightly to their lanes. I saw no…