search
The Sheraton Center Hotel, venue of the 2014 Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show (TAVES), represents a marked change from the genteel elegance of the King Edward Hotel, the TAVES venue for the past two years. Built in 1972 in a modern style, the Sheraton offers a lot more space—it also sports one of the most confusing show layouts that I've encountered. There are long corridors leading who-knows-where, and stairs going up and down that may or may not lead to exhibit areas. TAVES did its best to make things easy to find, with signs and with TAVES staff being as helpful as possible, but on…
Virginia retailer Command Performance A/V—115 Park Ave. Suite #2, Falls Church—is having a Grand Opening on Saturday November 8 from 11am to 5pm. The day will feature Constellation Audio's new Inspiration Series (above), presented by Irv Gross, Director of Sales for Constellation Audio.
MartinLogan's Truth in Sound Tour continues with the introduction of its new flagship loudspeaker, the built-to-order Neolith, at Overture Ultimate Home Electronics, 2423 Concord Pike, Wilmington, DE on Saturday, November 8, from 11am to 6pm.
Members of the MartinLogan sales, marketing and engineering team, along with Overture's founder Terry Menacker, will be available to answer questions, perform demos and provide an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the intensive development process that created Neolith. Neolith is the result of a 3-year-long development process. It combines the…
Editor's Note: On the 52nd anniversary of Stereophile's founding in 1962 by J. Gordon Holt, we are publishing this mea culpa "As We See it" essay from 1981, in which he explains why Vol.4 No.10 was almost six months late in mailing to subscribers. Gordon had relocated from the Philadephia suburbs to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1978, and as he had explained in the April 1978 issue, the move had not gone well. "Much of the equipment necessary for testing got damaged or destroyed in transit," he wrote, adding that "What had promised to be a superb listening room turned out to have some sticky…
I'm drawn to the idea of having a single transducer reproduce all the frequencies, but I appreciate the difficulties of this approach. Generally, the larger the driver, the better it is at reproducing low frequencies, and the worse at reproducing the highs. Thus, I was intrigued when I walked into the demo room of R2R Audio, a new Canadian manufacturer, which featured a single-driver system, with the driver having a 15" diameter, used in a dipole configuration. Can a driver like that reproduce anything other than the bass?
I sat down and listened. Well, yes, there was full-range sound,…
Let's say you want a reliable means of distinguishing between original works of art and forgeries of same. One thing you wouldn't do—assuming you know anything about art, human perception, or the subtle differences between car wax and excrement—is apply to the problem a blind test: You wouldn't waste your time bringing people in off the streets, showing them pairs of similar but nonidentical images for 15 seconds each, and expecting your test participants to provide answers of any worth. You wouldn't do that because it's stupid.
I take that back: It's beyond merely stupid—it's…
Just this morning I received an e-mail newsletter from a very nice objectivist-leaning man who works for a very nice objectivist-leaning company. In it he writes, "I accept that the Red-Book digital standard for CDs . . . very closely matches or exceeds human hearing on music. This has been confirmed by recent experiments of down-sampling High Definition records to Red-Book standard and then doing comparisons of the two. All results (that I am aware of at this time) indicate the two standards are indistinguishable in blind testing (footnote 4). And, in my opinion, blind testing of audio…
The Estelon X ($70,000/pair) was on the cover of the TAVES 2014 Show Guide, with the printed admonition "Don't miss Estelon in the Yorkville East Suite, 4th floor." Since they were kind enough to provide direction to the demo room, I just had to comply.
What I saw was a speaker with an appearance that seemed both artistic and organic, high-tech and yet natural. Sound—with Accuphase DP720 digital source, Brinkman Balance turntable, Benz Micro Ruby cartridge, Burmester 100 phono stage, Ayre KX-R Twenty preamp and Ayre MX-R Twenty amps—was absolutely topnotch, with delicacy as well as power…
Founded in 1979 by Jacques Mahul, Focal—formerly known as JMlab and as Focal-JMlab—is one of audio's success stories. Beginning with a single speaker model produced in a small workshop in Saint Etienne, France, the company is still headquartered there, but has expanded to employ over 250 workers, making products exported to over 160 countries. All Focal products are engineered in France; only a few lower-priced multimedia models and headphones are assembled in the Far East.
Focal makes products in six categories: 1) high-fidelity speakers, 2) home cinema, 3) multimedia and wireless, 4)…
One of my favorite tests of transient response is track 3 of the Chesky Records Jazz Sampler & Audiophile Test Compact Disc, Vol.1 (JD37): Brazilian singer Ana Caram's "Viola Fora de Moda." It's not the sort of music I normally listen to—and in terms of absolute fidelity, this 25-year-old recording it may not measure up to the resolution of the latest 24-bit/96kHz sources—but I'm very familiar with it, and it features lots of percussion instruments that challenge the ability of speakers (and other audio components) to reproduce their sounds. Through the Aria 936, the bells, cymbal, etc…