By days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Spencer Hughes worked as part of the BBC's loudspeaker research team. Among other accomplishments, he helped develop the 5" midrange/woofer for the fabled LS3/5A loudspeaker.
As speaker designers from Henry Kloss to Sonus Faber's Franco Serblin have told me, designing a successful 5" driver is "a doddle" (British for easy) compared to creating an 8" or larger cone. "It becomes harder to maintain clarity, focus, speed, and…
Over the years, all sorts of materials have been tried for woofer cones. Doped paper. Plastic…
Description: 2.5-way, floorstanding speaker. Drive-units: 7" Kevlar-reinforced cone woofer, 7" plastic-cone mid/woofer; 7/8" (22mm) polyamide-dome tweeter. Crossover frequencies: 900Hz, 3.2kHz, Frequency range: 29Hz–25kHz. Sensitivity: 90dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Minimum impedance: 4.5 ohms.
Dimensions: 38" high (including spikes), by 7.5" wide by 12.5" deep. Weight: 46 lbs.
Price: $6495/pair (add $1000 for a premium finish).
Manufacturer: Spendor Audio Systems Ltd., G5 Ropemaker Park, South Road, Hailsham, East Sussex BN27 3GY, England, UK.…
Audio Research's National Sales Manager Dave Gordon, joined by the Fine Sounds Group's David Stafford, will be introducing the new ARC Galileo Series, while McIntosh's Chris Smith and Michael Russo will discuss the past and future of McIntosh Labs, and will be demming the MC-275 tube mono amplifiers and C-2500 tube preamplifier with Wilson Audio Sasha Series…
I was shocked when I learned that my dear friend Harry Pearson had passed away, on November 4.
Harry founded the subjective audio magazine The Absolute Sound and published his first issue in 1972. He was enamored of what J. Gordon Holt had done in creating the first American subjective audio magazine, Stereophile, a decade earlier, but Harry wanted to take the concept to another level. In TAS, he and a small cadre of trusted writers reviewed all of the new high-…
Featured on the December issue's cover is the twentieth-anniversary upgrade of Ayre's KX-R preamplifier. John Atkinson sums up his experience thusly: "While $27,500 is a high price to pay for a line preamplifier, the KX-R Twenty is as good as a preamplifier can get." Two very differently engineered D/A processors,…
It’s Thanksgiving time, and New York jazz fans know what that means. No, not the Macy’s parade down Broadway or the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. The really big shows for our crowd—annual traditions for a while now—are the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra at the Jazz Standard and Jason Moran’s Bandwagon Trio at the Village Vanguard.
Both bands play Tuesday, November 25, through Sunday, November 30, though the Jazz Standard is dark on Thanksgiving itself.
Schneider is the preeminent big-band…
In the one scene in the new James Brown biopic, Get On Up, that's actually about his music, JB, who began his career in music as a drummer, tells his horn section to "sound like a drum." It also shows him being dictatorial and harsh, traits that contributed to his losing several bands' worth of key musicians over the years. Perched on the edge of such a…