BRIAN WILSON: SMiLE
Nonesuch 79846-2 (CD). 2004. Brian Wilson, prod., mix; Mark Linett, eng.; Kevin Deane, Daneil S. McCoy, Pete Magdaleno, asst. engs.; Darian Sahanaja, mix. AAD? TT: 47:01
Performance ****½
Sonics **** (footnote 1)
Give Brian Wilson credit. Few artists, let alone those who've had to do battle with an abusive father, drugs, quacks, chemical imbalances, and the pressure that comes from being, at age 24, a group's sole creative force, would have the guts or the inspiration to return to the scene of their greatest folly. Yet that is precisely what Wilson, 37…
Let's start with some music—three discs I recently have been using to evaluate equipment as well as listen to for enjoyment. They are as contrasting in style as one could hope for, but all on an enviably high musical plane. (Space considerations compel brevity approaching that necessary to sell screenplays to producers at cocktail parties, footnote 1) Ensemble Amarcord: And So It Goes (Apollon Classics apc 10102): Former choristers from Bach's own church make up this German version of The King's Singers. This contemporary a cappella program ranges from Billy Joel to Supertramp to a Cuban…
His central claim is that achieving low noise and distortion numbers are Pyrrhic victories. He claims that timing errors are introduced by having the music go through more than one silicon junction at once, those varying signal paths often being of varying length, and through multiple transistors that are very difficult to match. For M. Delétraz, it is nearly all about preserving the purity of the musical timing, and to that end he is cheerfully willing, after more than two decades of wandering in the wilderness of trial and error, to write off a lot of factors other companies obsess about…
For lowest hum and noise in most applications (excluding darTZeel's own 50 ohm output preamplifier, not yet released), it is necessary to tie the negative speaker terminals together with a jumper wire. The provided plain wire was a pain to use with speaker cables terminated by spade lugs, to the extent that I asked Stereovox's Chris Sommovigo to fabricate a single banana-to-banana jumper out of Stereovox wire. I unreservedly recommend such a wire (or the spade equivalent, if your speaker cables use bananas). At some risk to my reputation for being well-oriented in space and time, I must say…
Manufacturer's Comment Editor: Wow! John Marks' review leaves little to comment upon.
One customer told us his NHB-108 Model One was an "emotional amplifier," meaning it extended his emotions. I think John experienced something similar. The more you read what he wrote, the more you understand how much John liked the machine.
The NHB-108 Model One high-speed power amplifier is the first high-end audio gear we have brought to market, concretizing all those past years of research into what we were looking for. The companion preamplifier and the integrated amplifier will…
"An' then ya bring alla ground wahrs to uh, uh single po-wint..." He looked just like I always pictured: jet-blueblack hair Royal Crown'd into that famous pompadour, the heavily lidded eyes, the .357 Magnum in case Robert Goulet appeared on any nearby TV screen...and the Weller temperature-controlled soldering iron.
"...Ah think ya need to bypass them big ol' electrolytics, too..."
I knew I was dreaming, but it didn't matter; I'd been wrestling with the problems of purely passive preamps for months, and was nowhere close to any real solutions. I'd built my own passive…
Active or Passive
In a conventional system based on an active preamplifier, the signal source (phono stage, CD player, tape deck) is treated as a voltage source only; the high input impedance of the preamp enables the source component to drive its interconnect easily. In effect, the active preamp buffers the source component from the job of driving the interconnect feeding the power amplifier, tackling that job itself with its beefier output stage. But a passive preamp has no such circuit; while the source component "sees" a moderately high input impedance (in most cases, 10k ohms),…
I have only one itchin' desire: let me stand next to your wire
More than any other part of the preamp, here's where I say, "Knock yo' bad se'f out," because nobody agrees on wire! Whether 'tis nobler to use solid-core or multi-strand, copper or silver, twisted pair or coax, it's ALL UP TO YOU. I wired up my preamp with the twisted-pair inner conductors of Straight Wire LSI-Encore; with the white leg used for signal and the red leg tied to ground at the RCA jacks but left floating at the circuit board, isolation between conductors is higher than if I'd simply used single legs for all the…
Construction details
A design like this is pretty simple for the experienced constructor, so there aren't too many guidelines to lay out. Definitely make sure you use RCA jacks which come with isolation washers, like the Tiffanies or the Vampires, in order to keep the jacks from touching the chassis; the only ground point in the entire circuit should be that single point ground mentioned earlier. Mount the 470µF supply bypass caps (with their 1µF bypasses) as close to the BUF-03s as you can to ensure a solid path to ground for any noise. And even though they may look more "professional,"…
According to Kawakami, SACD software is beginning to sell and chart the way regular CDs used to—a good thing, he says, because "the music industry is in desperate need of a packaged media it can sell." Regular CD sales continue to decline, yet Universal has shipped 700,000 CD/SACD hybrid Police albums, Sony shipped 700,000 hybrid Dylan albums between September and November alone, and ABKCO has sold more than 2 million hybrid Rolling Stones discs in the past year. (Keep in mind that ABKCO's Stones discs are not a supplement to a back catalog of regular CDs: They have replaced single-layer…
