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Another Visit to Aardvark Boutique Audio

Was a sunny day. Not a cloud was in the sky. (With thanks to Paul Simon.) A good day for a drive. But where? "Is there some audio store you haven't been to for some time that you'd like to visit?" (My wife is well-acquainted with my interests.)

But of course! Aardvark Boutique Audio, in Orangeville, Ontario. I was at the store's opening and the owner, Peter Wolter, had said, "Come and see us in six months and see how we're doing." That was last July, so the timing was pretty close to being right.

Orangeville, about an hour's drive from Toronto (where we live), is a charming little…

Kal Rubinson Talks to Merging Technologies' Dominique Brulhart

As part of his preparation for reviewing Merging Technologies' NADAC Multichannel-8 networked D/A processor in the March 2016 issue of Stereophile, Kal Rubinson talked with the Swiss company's Dominique Brulhart.

Book Review: <I>Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock'n'Roll</I>

Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock'n'Roll
by Peter Guralnick. Little, Brown and Company, 2015. 763 pp. Hardcover, $32.

In Lost Highway, published soon after he was introduced to Sam Phillips, in 1979, Peter Guralnick said he had long dreamed of meeting the Sun Records founder, who produced the hits that introduced Elvis Presley and other pioneering rock'n'roll performers. He dedicated Lost Highway to Phillips and the blues singer Howlin' Wolf, calling them "the real heroes" of the musical genre, and a quarter-century relationship between Guralnick and Phillips followed. This long…

Listening #159

No one likes to be fooled, least of all those of us whose job it is to sort the real from the imagined: a tightrope walk, the audience for which reliably contains one or two rustics who delight in the occasional splat.

Such were my concerns in the days following last November's New York Audio Show, where I first encountered High Fidelity Cables—an exhibitor that generated considerable (figurative) buzz by promoting the use of magnets in an audio system's interconnects, speaker cables, and power cords. Indeed, by the end of the first day, more than one showgoer had asked me, "What did you…

Listening #159 Page 2

We began our listening with a borrowed sample of the Hommage T1, which had been in my system for a few months, and which had impressed me all the way to hell and back. The T1 was my favorite, and I made no secret of it. Sure enough, the T1-fueled system sounded great that day. But before moving on to a different trannie, I had to leave the house for a short while and collect my daughter at school. I returned home about 20 minutes later, and my visitor and I decided to spin one more record before making any changes.

My system now sounded like shit: pinched highs, no texture, a compete…

Music in the Round #77

With the atomization of the playback of digital files into storage, servers, streamers, format converters, and DACs, I find that I've accumulated many miniature power supplies: small pods and wall warts. Most of these are generic switching devices made by companies other than the manufacturers of the components they power, and even those not designed for audio systems are, of necessity, at least adequate for the task. Because many of these supplies are indistinguishable from each other, I've taken to labeling them with sticky notes to remind me which goes with which component. Nonetheless, I…

Music in the Round #77 Page 2

The Multichannel-8's Ethernet interface (gigabit Ethernet only) is used for the playback of computer-based files through a Ravenna ASIO driver at any resolution up to 384kHz, DXD, and DSD256, as well as through up to eight channels. Incoming data are placed in a large memory buffer and clocked by a precision clock. Along with Ravenna's IEEE1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP), this is intended to eliminate the jitter problems associated with other interfaces. The Multichannel-8 also handles AES/EBU and S/PDIF digital inputs up to 192kHz, and will accept DSD over PCM (DoP).

The case is a…

Major Debuts at Definitive's Music Matters 11

Product debuts galore were only one of the reasons that March 3's Music Matters 11, the latest installment of Definitive Audio Seattle's annual four-hour evening marathon, was a model event of its kind. Another, articulated by Definitive's president Craig Abplanalp to exhibitors less than an hour before the doors opened at 5pm, was that, at this Definitive Audio 40th Anniversary celebration, music rather than long-winded product spiels was the focus of each 20-minute listening session.

Certainly audiophiles heard the call. Music Matters 11 drew over 500 people. This means that, in the…

Salon Son et Image put on hold (and now reborn!)

In an announcement made yesterday on their corporate website, UK-based Chester Group—which, in recent years, has sponsored consumer-audio shows in Vancouver, Brooklyn, and Brighton, UK, among other locales—revealed that they are "deferring" this year's Salon Son et Image, which had been scheduled to take place March 18 through 20 at the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal.

In the post, Chester Group Marketing and Creative Director Scott Humphrey points to "a substantial drop in companies interested in exhibiting at this ongoing event." In a reference to SSI's founders, from whom Chester Group…

Cary Audio Takes the Direct Sales Route (Kinda Sorta)

Two weeks shy of the Ides of March, Cary Audio has announced its transition from an all-dealer sales model to a direct-to-consumer web store in the U.S. it calls "CaryDirect." But rather than leaving its brick'n'mortar US dealers in the dust, the North Carolina-based company says it has assimilated them into a rather novel hybrid business model.

"We've changed the whole way we do things," company founder Billy Wright explained by phone of the company he began with Dennis Had in 1989. "We always sold through our website. Now, as the number of good dealers is declining, we have established…