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Brian Walsh and Essential Audio of Barrington, IL put on a highly enjoyable demonstration. There was something eccentric but wonderful happening with each song. The equipment mix was eccentric and wonderful, too: What is not to like about the Kuzma Stabi S turntable ($2156 and perhaps the best bargain in contemporary hifi), the Kuzma Stogi Ref 313 CE VTA tonearm ($4640), and Kuzma CAR-30 moving-coil cartridge. The digital source components were equally impressive: Aurender N100H music player/streamer ($2699), and the Resonessence Labs Veritas DAC which was premiering at Axpona ($2850). CDs…
Self to Herb: "Help! Can you bail me out? 68 rooms in three days are more than I can possibly cover
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Negotiations complete, fingers crossed, I discover myself with 18 more rooms to go on floors 12 and 4, and a short day in which to cover them. Well, in the Jewish religion, 18=chai=life: if ever there were an affirmation that there is light at the end of the tunnel, 18 is it. So I say some Baruch atahs, Hail Marys, and Hare Krishnas, and off I go.
Before continuing the tale, however, I want to extend my sincere apologies to the 4th-floor exhibitors whom I was unable to visit.…
AXPONA Chicago 2016 was, by all accounts, a success. JD Events, who stage the show, report that they sold 5934 tickets, a 16% increase over 2015. Correspondingly, 2015's unique-visitor count of 3626 increased by over 400 to 4,092.
On Sunday, the show's experimental Student Day program, which offered a $5 rate for most college students and free admission for students from two partner colleges, drew 137 attendees. This, it should be added, was on a rare day with high temperatures and skies perfect for sunning on the shores of Lake Michigan. Given a choice between the reportedly popular all…
Slam and visceral impact were superb, highs transparent and extended, and percussion extremely impressive in the ENIGMAcoustics room. Headlined by ENIGMAcoustics' Mythology M1 hybrid electrostatic monitor system ($14,690/pair, including Sopranino super tweeter and stand), the system also showcased Questyle Audio's R200i wireless audio system ($4000, including two class-D monoblock/receiver/DAC units at 200Wpc and one T2 5GHz preamp/transmitter) and Questyle Audio's QP1R portable music server ($1000) streaming 44.1K wav files.
The fine sound on Gustavo Santaolalla's "The Last of Us (You…
AudioVisionSF (1628 California Street, San Francisco) and Lavish HiFi (1044 4th Street, Santa Rosa) are holding loudspeaker set-uos today, 7:30–9:30pm (AVSF) and tomorrow, 2–7pm (Lavish) featuring Benno Meldgaard (Chief Designer, pictured above at the 2014 RMAF) and Michael Vamos of GamuT.
RSVP to info@audiovisionsf.com or (415) 614-1118 for today or to Lavish Hi-Fi's Facebook page.
Emitt Rhodes: Rainbow Ends
Omnivore OVLP-163 (LP). 2016. Chris Price, prod., eng.; Pierre de Reeder, Kyle Frederickson, engs.; Nathan Flom, Emitt Rhodes, Emeen Zarookian, add'l. engs. ADA? TT: 37:01
Performance ****
Sonics ****
"A few shows here, a few shows there—Emitt eventually found himself without a label, and his career came to a halt," reads the biography on EmittRhodesMusic.net. "He had had enough. He was 24."
Go on, admit it: Everyone loves a disappearing act—the plight of the unjustly snakebit, the ghostly casualties of a business that markets creativity but doesn't…
I was in a strange mood last January when I posted this on Facebook: "Do speaker designers strive for accuracy, or for a 'sound' they think potential buyers want?" I doubted that any designer with two working ears would even attempt to design speakers that merely measured well—there must be at least some subjectivity in their process. I also assumed that few designers would go on record about where they stand on the accuracy question, so I was thrilled when Elac Americas' speaker designer, Andrew Jones, responded:
Accuracy in terms of closest approach to the original performance is…
Sad, sad news - and he did the best SuperBowl Show evah!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NN3gsSf-Ys
Unreal. Forget about the year punk broke, or the day the music died, 2016 is shaping up to be an annus horribilis for musicians. Prince dead at age 57? It simply cannot be true.
Yes, when he was young he learned much from James Brown, a fact he always admitted, but from there Prince certainly created his own very powerful and influential body of pop/rock/funk, that will undoubtedly stand the test of time and is almost incalculably influential. While albums like Sign ‘O’ the Times, Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain and Crystal Ball rank as essential and he often thought of himself as an album…
I first encountered the work of Dave Wilson in the late 1970s. He was then a recording engineer responsible for some great-sounding records, including pianist Mark P. Wetch's Ragtime Razzmatazz (LP, Wilson Audio W-808), which quickly became one of my favorite system-demo records.
Then Wilson turned his attention to designing loudspeakers. His first model was the Wilson Audio Modular Monitor, reviewed for Stereophile by its then-publisher, Larry Archibald, in August 1983, who described it as "the most enjoyable speaker system I've listened to, and significantly valuable as a diagnostic…