In SPU cartridges, which have been around since the late 1950s, the cartridge is integrated with a plug-in headshell, usually with an output-pin arrangement in the SME or "international" (as opposed to EMT) pattern. There are many variants of the basic, iconic SPU design, but most are high-mass, low-…
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Last spring, at the High End show in Munich, I met with Leif Johannsen, R&D manager and chief designer of Ortofon (footnote 1), who walked me through the company's exhibition. Among the new products he showed me were two low-cost, low-output SPU (stereo pickup) moving-coil cartridges.
Most of what seemed to be missing were playback artifacts that ride along with the detail, along with the "visual" elements that help produce spatial context, including reverberant trails, initial transients, decay elements, etc. What was left were vivid, generously sized, richly drawn aural images laden with textures and harmonic vitality. Whether you hear this as thick and slow or as rich and full is a matter of sonic perspective.
Getz's breathy tenor saxophone was less in the clouds and more down on the ground, while the drummer Milton Banana's rim shots attained levels of…
In 1984, Metal Blade Records of Van Nuys, California, released the fifth edition of its Metal Massacre series, which had already unleashed such bands as RATT, Metallica, Slayer, and Lizzy Borden onto an unwitting music-buying public. On the second track, among future stalwarts Overkill, Fates Warning, and Metal Church as well as no-hit wonders Lethyl Synn and Jesters of Destiny, was an oddly named band from Jonquière, Quebec: Voïvod, spelled Voi Vod on the album cover. Voïvod's four members were Blacky, Away, Piggy, and Snake.
The band was new, had played its first concert just the year…
With a system like this, Thoreau would never have gone into the woods to begin with.
Last weekend, I visited an old friend who lives near Walden Pond of Henry Thoreau fame. I hadn't visited him since before the pandemic. He had just finished adding a wing to his house that included a dedicated hi-fi listening room the size and shape of a small church. Below a cathedral ceiling, the sweet spot featured seating for no fewer than 30 guests. Besides serving as his main listening room—he has another one that's smaller—it serves as a large residential parlor with a baby grand piano for use in…
As a life-long film-photo shooter with a darkroom since I was 12, I am particularly disturbed by an aesthetic trend I see in contemporary digital photography: excessive edge sharpening and amped-up contrast structures. These Photoshop/Lightroom tools render captured light into something as unsubtle and blatantly artificial as a Vegas show girl. (There's a real person under there somewhere, but she's hidden.)
Shadows are the connective tissue of our visual reality. The chief effect of artificial edge sharpening is to disrupt our perception of realness.
It seems that those…
The finest soup I ever tasted was served in Kamakura City, Japan, in 1992. After climbing a mountain to a shrine that held a lock of Buddha's hair, I descended to Kamakura and walked to its Great Bronze Buddha. By the time I had taken my fill of the image's 730-year-old wonders and the countless picture-taking tourists at its base—a mild precursor to "the world is a backdrop for my ego" snappers of the smartphone age—I noticed that my stomach was growling.
Exhausted, I walked back into town and descended stairs into a conveniently located corner restaurant. I had to eat fast because my…
Setup
As I placed the amps on my Grand Prix Monza amp stands, I noted their special feet, from SuperSpikes, a Norwegian company owned by Norwegian speaker-driver manufacturer SEAS. "You are free to change these to whatever you are familiar with or keep the original ones," Danielsen emailed after our talk. When I listened to the same recording and switched between those spikes and Wilson Audio Pedestals, the latter supplied a bit more air without changing the amp's sonic signature. I went back and forth between these supports during the review period.
Electrocompaniet's well-…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Solid state, fully balanced class-AB mono/stereo power amplifier. Input: 1 balanced (XLR) mono, 2 balanced (XLR) stereo. Output: 2 pair binding posts per channel, 3 balanced (XLR) links. Rated output power mono 800W into 8 ohms (29dBW), 1500W into 4 ohms (28.8dBW), 2200W into 2 ohms (27.4dBW). Rated output power stereo: 300Wpc into 8 ohms (24.8dBW), 600Wpc into 4 ohms (24.8dBW), 1000W into 2 ohms (24dBW). Frequency response 0.5Hz–220kHz, ±3dB. Input impedance: 330k ohms. Signal/noise ratio (ref. 1W into 8 ohms, A-weighted): 95dB. THD+N (mono, 300W,…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital sources: dCS Vivaldi Apex DAC, Vivaldi Upsampler Plus, Vivaldi Master Clock; Innuos Statement Next-Gen Music Server; Small Green Computer Sonore Deluxe opticalModule; Uptone Audio EtherRegen with SOtM sCLK-OCX10 Master Clock and sPS-500 power supply; Nordost QSource linear power supplies (2); HDPlex 300 linear power supply; Synology 5-bay 1019+ NAS powered by Ferrum Hypsos linear/switching hybrid power supply; Linksys mesh router and Arris modem; Apple 2017 iPad Pro and 2017 MacBook Pro laptop with 2.8GHz Intel i7, SSD, 16GB RAM.
Preamplifier:…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Because JVS auditioned the Electrocompaniet AW 800 M as a pair of monoblocks, I performed a complete set of measurements of the amplifier in that mode with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system. I confirmed the results with the higher-performance APx500, then repeated some tests with the amplifier operating in two-channel mode.
I preconditioned the AW 800 M by following the CEA's recommendation, running it at one-eighth the specified power into 8 ohms for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, the top panel above the internal heatsinks was hot, at 117°F (47.3°C…