search
A vital member of the second wave of Texas singer-songwriters that emerged in the 1970s and included Lucinda Williams, Butch Hancock, and Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith was a product of a time when, to paraphrase a once-ubiquitous bumper sticker, Austin was still weird. Gifted with a delicate, sweet voice and fierce determination, she started playing out at the age of 12 and getting paid at 14. While never having the ability to project Joan Baez–like volume, she could certainly fill a room. And while her voice could at times take on a flat, almost-nasal resonance, her tight vibrato was strong…
Register to win an AudioQuest Cobalt portable USB DAC (retail value $349.95; limited-time $199.95) we are giving away.
From the company:
In the December 2019 issue of Stereophile, John Atkinson pondered: “Is AudioQuest’s DragonFly Cobalt worth the extra $100 compared with the DragonFly Red? Yes. That sense of ease it offers with long-term listening is something I don’t want to do without.”
Now through December 31, 2023, AudioQuest’s multi-award-winning DragonFly Cobalt is available for just $199.95 ($259.95 CAD)—$50 less than DragonFly Red’s price at the time of…
Saturday, August 18, 1962, was quite a day in music. In England, Ringo Starr made his first appearance as a full member of the Beatles, at a Horticultural Society dance at Port Sunlight, Merseyside. In Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, two jazz giants met in a recording studio for the first time. Duke Ellington showed up with a streamlined, potent ensemble: Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Ray Nance, Lawrence Brown, Aaron Bell, and Sam Woodyard. Then tenor sax legend Coleman Hawkins arrived.
Ellington and Hawkins had never recorded together, so there was an atmosphere of energy and something…
My adoptive mother, Lily Mae, was a retired businesswoman and former fashion model turned stay-at-home mom and artist-painter with famously good taste in everything. She raised me to have good manners, an "active awareness of color and texture," and "an eye for form." She expected me to critique her paintings, her decorating, and her wardrobe, urging me constantly to develop "good taste in everything."
In Lil's world, a perfect day was for me to skip school and go with her clothes shopping at Marshall Field's, where it was my job to sit in a plush chair offering comments about which…
When I grew out of shopping with mom, I began fitting pipe with my father and making hay every June with my uncles. Before I drove cars, I drove tractors in Wisconsin. The fields with the cut hay were about a half-mile from the shed where the tractors were stored, which meant I drove on the paved road dragging an empty wood wagon behind me. In one of the upper gears, with the throttle partway open, I'd space out listening to the deep-volumed rap-rap-rap of power issuing from the tractor's exhaust stack while making my way slowly up and down the rolling hills. The tractor's mass was so…
About four years ago, the stand-alone tonearm market went through a bit of a crisis. First, in December 2019, SME announced that it would stop selling tonearms separately, effective immediately. From that point on, SME tonearms would be available only in combination with SME turntables. The decision seemed baffling: SME had been the tonearm company for more than 60 years; the company's slogan was "the best pick-up arm in the world." But they also just happened to make some really nice turntables.
More recently, SME partially reversed this decision, making their lower cost M2 series arms…
Zu Audio DL-103 Mk.II Rev B phono cartridge
I can't think of another audio component that has been in continuous production for as long as the Denon DL-103, which was first produced in 1962 or 1964 depending on which source you believe. Sure, there have been a few revivals of vintage products over the years, and you can even buy a new pair of my beloved Quad ESL 57 loudspeakers, but the Denon has never gone away in 60 years. Originally developed for use by Japan's national broadcasting company NHK, the DL-103 found its way into US retailers around 1975 and saw its first of many…
I first met Musical Fidelity's founder, Antony Michaelson, in 1978, when he was running tube amplifier manufacturer Michaelson & Austin. I still have an M&A TVA-10 amplifier, which was designed by the late, great Tim de Paravicini. Soon after Antony founded Musical Fidelity in 1982, he employed de Paravicini to design the A1 integrated amplifier (footnote 1).
The A1 was a slim solid state design with a class-A output stage that output 20Wpc into 8 ohms. By contrast, the massive, dual-mono Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 800 integrated amplifier, which Michael Fremer reviewed for…
Listening
Prior to installing the Nu-Vista 800.2, I had been using the Audio Research I/50 I reviewed in the September 2023 issue. I wrote in that review that this tubed integrated "has a touch of that 'tube magic' but without going whole hog, as so many of the current crop of tubed amplifiers do." But with the I/50 driving the Monitor Audios, on tracks like Taylor Swift's "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)," from the album Red (24/96 FLAC, Big Machine Records/Qobuz), the low bass was overpowering. It turned out that the Platinum 300 3G's port tuning frequency coincided with that of…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Hybrid integrated amplifier using nuvistors and bipolar transistors. Tube complement: 4 7586s. Output devices: 5 pairs per channel. Inputs: 4 pairs unbalanced (RCA), 1 pair balanced (XLR). Line-level outputs: 1 pair fixed (RCA), 1 pair variable (RCA). Speaker connections: 2 pairs 4mm banana plug/binding posts. Output power: 330Wpc into 8 ohms (25.2dBW), 500Wpc into 4 ohms (24dBW); 1000W peak into 2 ohms (24dBW). Output voltage: 52V RMS, 20Hz–20kHz; onset of clipping, 147V peak–peak. Output current: 120A peak–peak. Damping factor: 200. Frequency…