The fine sound on Gustavo Santaolalla's "The Last of Us (You…
search
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.
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…
The Sabrina comes with a deluxe three-ring binder that includes detailed unpacking and setup instructions, but Wilson Audio strongly advises that you leave these tasks to an authorized dealer "trained in the art and science of the Wilson Audio Setup Procedure." In my case, this involved the Toronto area's Wilson dealer, Audio Excellence, and the setup expertise of Wilson's director of sales, Peter McGrath. Given McGrath's long experience in setting up Wilson speakers, I was content to leave the Sabrinas' initial setup to him—with input from me. Like me, McGrath likes to set up speakers to…
Having recently upgraded my phono system, I've been playing LPs more frequently. As a kind of tribute, one of the first recordings I played through the Sabrinas was Concert, Dave Wilson's first recording of a pipe organ (Wilson H-1-77). I started with Johann Gottfried Walter's Concerto 3, played by James Welch on a tracker-action organ. There was a great sense of space, the sound of the organ filling the venue in a manner both powerful and delicate. I think of the pipe organ as a "slow" instrument, with no real transients—compared to, say, a piano—but with this recording played through the…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25.4mm) doped-silk dome tweeter, 5.7" (146.1mm) paper–pulp-cone midrange unit, 7.9" (203.2mm) paper–pulp-cone woofer. Impedance: 4 ohms nominal, 2.53 ohms minimum at 139Hz. Sensitivity: 87dB/W/m at 1kHz. Frequency response: 31Hz–21kHz, ±3dB, Room Average Response. Minimum amplification: 50Wpc.
Dimensions: 37.6" (964.8mm) H (38.9"/998mm H with spikes) by 11.9" (304.8mm) W by 15" (385.5mm) D. Weight: 93.8 lbs (42.64kg) net each; 221.5 lbs (100.7kg) shipping per pair.
Finishes: Desert…