"Why do we have music?" Nancy Kanwisher, one of the scientists behind the research, asked in an interview with Angier. Is our "sensitivity to music . . . tunable with experience?…
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Researchers at MIT recently discovered a "music channel" in the human brain. These neural pathways respond to all kinds of music—and only to music. "A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it," Natalie Angier wrote in the New York Times. "No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener's auditory cortex will fire in response" (footnote 1).
Most audio reviewers praise long-term listening as the gold standard for auditioning an audio component. I agree, but there's no better time to notice a difference in the sound than just after you've made a change in a familiar system. When I plugged in the NuWave DSD, hooked it up to my early-2015 MacBook Pro, and began playing music via the playback application Roon, the most striking and immediate changes were rhythmic. Drums thwacked. A woodblock sounded like a woodblock, not a recording of one. When I put on one of my favorite classical CDs, Clifford Curzon's 1962 recording of Brahms's…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Solid-state digital-to-analog converter. Digital Audio Inputs: Coax, TosLink, USB, I2S. Sample Rates: Coax input: PCM, 44.1–192kHz. Optical input: PCM, 44.1–96kHz. I2S: PCM, 44.1–192kHz; DSD, single rate (2.8MHz) and double rate (5.6MHz), raw. USB: USB2.0 Asynchronous Audio; PCM, 44.1–192kHz; DSD single rate (2.8MHz) and double rate (5.6MHz), DoP. Analog Audio Output: 2 unbalanced (RCA), 2 balanced (XLR). Output level, maximum (RMS): 2.8V unbalanced, 5.6V balanced. Output impedance: 100 ohms unbalanced, 200 ohms balanced. Frequency response: 10Hz–…
Mincing no words, Audioengine's Brady Bargenquast declared, "Bluetooth usually sounds like cat shit. Therefore, when we designed our wireless B1 Premium Bluetooth music receiver ($189), which just started shipping last week, we did four things to ensure good sound quality and satisfactory listening:
1. We're using the aptX codec, which is 16-bit.
2. On the receiver side, we upsample everything to 24/96 and lower the noise floor using the same AKM4396 DAC chip as in our D1 and D3.
3. Our receiver has an extended range, which projects at least 100 feet and covers 1–3 rooms.
4.…
Sundays customarily draw a smaller attendance at shows, but CAS's Sunday across from San Francisco International Airport was especially slow until, surprisingly, things speeded up shortly before the runway was in sight. Either lots of audiophiles spend their Sunday mornings in church, or they're too occupied with family, brunch with friends, or hangovers to get a move on before noon.
Happily, things were not at all slow in the room shared by Burwell & Sons and Raven Audio. Thanks to Dave Thomson of Raven Audio's impeccably ordered email, I can report that the set-up consisted of a…
Snatching my prize for best sound on the third floor, the world premiere of the new Wells Audio Innamorata Signature amplifier ($13,000), enhanced by the new crystal technology in Jack Bybee's A/V Signal Enhancers ($119.95) and Bybee Technologies power cables ($1500), blew me away. Whoever expected, on Reference Recordings' new Kansas City Symphony recording of the suite from Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, such impeccably detailed, superbly controlled full-range sound in such a small room?
True, Jeff Wells is gifted with set-up acumen. This is reflected in his use of Shakti…
Amy LaVere: Runaway's Diary
Archer ARR 319611/2 (LP/CD). 2014. Luther Dickinson, prod.; Kevin Houston, eng., Daniel Lyon, asst. eng. ADA/ADD. TT: 38:27.
Archer ARR 319611/2 (LP/CD). 2014. Luther Dickinson, prod.; Kevin Houston, eng., Daniel Lyon, asst. eng. ADA/ADD. TT: 38:27.
"It's not your average gal that drinks bourbon neat, walks around with a pocket atlas and drives a big white gear van. I thought she was charming and awfully funny."
Talent and humor has never been a problem for Amy LaVere. Not long after high school she led Last Minute, a Detroit punk band. When we next hear of her, she's in Nashville as part of a husband-and-wife folk/country duo, The Gabe and Amy Show, who released a single…
I've always considered the high end to be industrial art. People who favor a certain brand are saying, in a way, "I like that designer's interpretation. I like his or her art."—David Wilson
Last March, I had a rare experience akin to hearing the same recording through two different systems. I heard Andris Nelsons conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the same program—Haydn's Symphony 90, and Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn, followed by his Symphony 3—in two very different venues: UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall and, 50 miles north, Sonoma State University's Weill Hall.
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It's like hearing the name of an old friend and then seeing him, in your mind's eye, as he was when you were both much younger: Whenever talk turns to Boulder, Colorado–based PS Audio, I can't help picturing that company's Model IV preamplifier, of the early 1980s—most likely because that was the preamp I longed to own at the time. (Tragically, I couldn't afford to buy it, so I struggled on with my NAD 1020.)
An awful lot has changed since then, including, in recent years, a shift of PS Audio's emphasis from audio amplification to AC-power regeneration. Even more recently, under the…
As it turned out, the silence wasn't the result of a hardware or firmware flaw. Rather, it pointed to the need for greater care in optimizing my computer settings—greater, that is, than the level of care required by most PCM-only USB processors, the relative simplicity of which had lulled me into a false sense of expertise. During a conversation with Paul McGowan I learned that I needed to: open my iMac's AudioMIDI Setup window; highlight the left-column choice for the PS Audio DAC; change the source default sampling rate from 44.1 to 192kHz; and remove from the master-channel "Mute" box a…