Lander: You've long used exotic equipment to make your recordings.
Chesky: We have so many things in our studio: a large selection of vintage tube mikes, our own custom tube mike preamps and custom tube mike mixers. We use a lot of audiophile mike cable, and we have a SoundField mike that we had customized as well. We use Genex multichannel optical disc recorders, and we have a selection of A/D and D/A converters.
Lander: As a longtime champion of high-resolution digital and the first to release a recording with 128x oversampling, do you want to comment on the format wars?
… A few nights ago, John Atkinson and I played host to a speaker designer and a turntable manufacturer. We were all chewing over the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show, talking about different systems we'd heard there and speculating as to which designs would be around for the long haul. The speaker designer said he'd heard no truly bad sound at the Show. Nods all around the table—none of us had. The turntable manufacturer asked if any of us could recall hearing any spectacularly bad products recently. We all shook our heads. "Actually," I said, thinking about the Audio Research CD2 CD player…
Between good sense and good taste there is the same difference as between cause and effect.—Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696)
Impatient sort that I am, I didn't let the CD2 gather much dust between plugging it in and playing it. According to my well-thumbed copy of Earn Big Bucks as a Hi-Fi Critic, this is where I'm supposed to impress everybody with my description of how horrid it sounded cold out of the box. But it didn't. From the start, the CD2 sounded warm, big-boned, and inviting. Oh, the sound bloomed and steadily grew more refined and relaxed over the next several hours, but it…
It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.—Karl Popper (1902-1994)
Conditioned as I have become to the proposition that when you audition two components side by side you will be able to identify differences between them, I was initially startled by how few significant differences I heard when comparing the Audio Research CD2 with the Mark Levinson No.39. That's not to say that there were none, just that most of them were either musically unimportant or so small as to seem piddling. Ruth Laredo's superb-sounding CD of Beethoven piano sonatas (…
Sidebar 1: Specifications Description: Single-chassis CD player with 20-bit delta-sigma DAC and digital outputs (one XLR AES/EBU, balanced; one BNC coaxial S/PDIF, 75 ohms; one TosLink fiber-optical; optional ST-type glass fiber-optical). Analog outputs: one pair balanced XLR, one pair RCA single-ended. Jitter reduction: high-stability crystal-controlled re-clocking for all outputs. Frequency response: 0.1Hz-20kHz, ±2dB. Phase linearity: <0.5 degrees, 20Hz-20kHz. S/N Ratio: 96dBA. Distortion: -90dB (0.003%) at 1kHz. Output impedance (analog): 350 ohms balanced, 175 ohms single-ended.…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment CD Players: Krell KAV-300cd, Mark Levinson No.39.Preamplifier: Conrad-Johnson ART.
Power Amplifiers: Cary CAD-300SEI, Krell FPB 600 and KAV-300i.
Loudspeakers: B&W Silver Signature, EgglestonWorks Andra, ProAc Response One SC.
Cables: Kimber KCAG and WireWorld GEI interconnects, Kimber Black Pearl and WireWorld GEI speaker cables.
Accessories: Audio Power Industries Power Wedge 112, Magro Stereo Display Stand, Foundation 24" stands.
Sound Treatment: ASC Tube Traps, Studio Traps, Bass Traps; RPG Abffusors; micronoetic feline.—Wes Phillips…
Sidebar 3: Measurements The Audio Research CD2 proved well able to cope with damaged CDs. The Pierre Verany test disc has deliberate data dropouts; the CD2 could play up to track 33, a 1.5mm gap in the data, without the sound muting. The player's output level at 0dBFS from its single-ended jacks was 0.7dB higher than the CD-standard 2V, at 2.16V. The channels matched to within 0.05dB at 1kHz, which is excellent. From the balanced outputs, the output offered the expected doubling, to 4.3V. The source impedance was similar to specification at 350 ohms (balanced) and 195 ohms (unbalanced),…
When Ken Kantor helped to found Now Hear This, Inc. (most commonly referred to by its initials, NHT) in 1986, he brought with him a wealth of design and production experience learned from stints with NAD and Acoustic Research. He also brought a desire to build and market products that a wide range of people could afford. NHT began by producing small, two-way designs distinguished by the angled front baffle which remains the company's trademark. The latter is no gimmick, but was designed to optimize the loudspeakers' radiation pattern, a matter of keen interest to Kantor ever since his…
While the NHT 3.3 certainly does the other stuff well, the bottom end of its range sets it apart. I've never heard bass with this combination of true extension and clean and unmuddled mid- and upper bass from any other one-piece loudspeaker—either in this room or in any other. Only on a very few recordings—like the deepest bass on the synthesizer-enhanced version of Also Sprach Zarathustra (from Time Warp, Telarc CD-80106), or the fundamentals of a raging waterfall as reproduced on the final "Rhinefalls" cut from Staccato 2 (Audio (Germany) 101013)—did a first-rate subwoofer, such as the…
Corey Greenberg wrote about the NHT 3.3 in March 1994 (Vol.17 No.3):
In my 1993 WCES report last April, I reported that the most impressive product I'd heard at the Show was the introduction of NHT's new flagship loudspeaker, the $4000/pair Model 3.3. Even under the iffy conditions of a show demo, the big 3.3s just floored me—I had honestly never heard speakers do what I was hearing these new NHTs do. Although the 3.3s had already been snatched up by Tom Norton for review, I made arrangements to get a pair into my He-Man listening room as soon as my plane touched back down in TX.
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