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The first audiophile I met lived near a sewage treatment plant on the outskirts of Moscow. It was a few months after the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1992, when I was a college senior, and I recall walking with my father to his home past block after block of the identical dingy white tenements that encircle most Eastern European cities. Pasha (that's what I'll call him) lived in one of them. A friend of my father's, he turned out to be a wiry character in his early 40s with a toothy smile and the darting eyes of a collector. He led us through his sparsely furnished, rundown one-bedroom…
One of the privileges of being a reviewer is being able to live with a wide variety of components. For the past year and a half, I've been listening to LPs using solid state, high-gain phono preamplifiers like the Parasound Halo JC 3+, the Sutherland Little Loco, and the Lejonklou Entity, which I've come to admire for their coherence and resolution. While I was reviewing the Entity, Ken Micallef brought over his Tavish Adagio, a tubed phono preamp with a great-sounding moving magnet section that we paired with my Auditorium 23 SPU step-up transformer. The combination didn't always sound as…
And now for something completely different, Part 2
On the gentle urging of one of the nicest guys in the biz, Ed O'Herlihy, owner of Ontario retailer EQ audio video, I visited, among the many exhibits Ed was hosting in his nearly stadium-sized space, was the Focal 1000 series Utopia 7.0.4 Dolby Atmos demonstration, the exact same setup that Focal presented in Dallas at this year's CEDIA Expo.
I was played two tracks, one from a scene from the movie The Greatest Showman and the other Elton John's "Rocket Man." A word about the .0 designation in 7.0.4. That digit refers to the…
A room I can always count on to deliver soul-stirring, heart-warming, duct-tearing, yearning-to-possess sound is the one hosted by Hearken Audio/Atelier Audio, an oasis of some of the least mechanical, most musical sound I've heard this side of real-life music.
You want to hear about something else that was completely different? The Ilumnia magister speakers ($34,000). They're a one-of-a-kind design featuring an inverted spiderless, surroundless floating midbass driver suspended by an electromagnet, over which projects like a shooting star on a metal beam a directional silk-dome tweeter.…
And now for something completely different, Part 3.
Ever heard of a monophonic integrated amplifier? An amp that includes a single amplification channel along with its single channel preamplification stage? I hadn't until I visited manufacturer Eon Art's room, which was demoing a pair of such a rare, in fact, one-of-a-kind, beast, called the Boson ($72,537/each).
This 250W amp is particular in other ways, including that it's a dual hybrid: it's both a tubed and solid state design and a linear and switching one, employing a combination of class-A and class-D circuits. And if those…
Whenever I install a new, in-for-review DAC, after some amount of spaced-out not-listening listening I find myself just sitting there, being happy I got the damn thing working. Once I recover from the stress of installation, my brain begins, without prompting, to examine the character of sound coming out of my speakers. Half-consciously I wonder: How does this sound sound? Has changing DACs altered the contrast, viscosity, or timbre? Does the energy of recordings feel more or less intense with the new DAC? I make these observations lazily but empirically, with a fair amount of detachment.…
The R7HE MK2's chassis is big and heavy, measuring 17" × 5" on its front elevation and 19" deep; this depth could present a problem in some equipment racks. It comes triple-boxed and weighs 37.8lb—1lb more than the dCS Bartók and about 1lb less than the HoloAudio May (both chassis together).
Audio-GD's R7HE MK2 is made in China and sold and supported with a two-year parts and labor warranty by 50-year industry veteran Walter Liederman at Underwood HiFi.
Setup and use
The Audio-GD R7HE is a standalone DAC with no volume control, so I connected its output to HoloAudio's Serene…
Like at the last Toronto Audiofest, I listened to two of EQ Audio's main systems that were setup at both ends mirror-image-like along the length of the back wall of their huge, subdivided exhibit space. One system included another North American premiere!—the Monitor Audio 3-way PL200 3G speakers ($17,500/pair), which have a specified frequency range of 25Hz–60kHz, and were connected to a 500Wpc, dual-monoblock Rotel Michi S5 power amp ($10,000), and a Michi 3-2bit streaming DAC-equipped P5 preamp ($5900). Associated equipment included Kimber Kables throughout, an Audience Adept Response AR6…
The Toronto Audiofest 2022 may not have been the busiest audio show I've attended, but it was still a success. It had plenty of new product launches, great-sounding rooms, and a good amount of traffic, especially on Saturday, when seats became a hot commodity in many exhibit rooms.
A few other observations: the sound of digital keeps getting better. Thanks in part to the advent of network switches and better Ethernet cables, digital has reached a new tier of performance. It has never before sounded this overall smooth, sweet, and analog-like organic—there, I said it! It's amazing how much…
Some audio experiences stick in your memory. For me, one such was in 1978, which I reminisced about in a 1987 review for Stereophile of the Mission PCM 7000 CD player, Mission 780 Argonaut loudspeaker, and Cyrus Two integrated amplifier. Mission founder Farad Azima (footnote 1) was a driving force in the UK audio scene in the late 1970s, when I was deputy editor of the English magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review.
"I used to regularly visit [Farad] at his London apartment and witness stages in the design of a loudspeaker that, in retrospect, would put Mission Electronics on the high-…