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…
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Bethesda, MD retailer JS Audio (4919 St. Elmo Avenue) is having an open house Saturday November 22, 12pm–4pm to debut the new Audio Research Galileo Series amplifier and preamplifier with the Wilson Audio Alexandria XLF loudspeakers!
Harry Pearson (left) with Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt (right) at a 1988 party in Sea Cliff, NY. Photo: Chris Yuin
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-…
The December issue is here and it features our annual "Products of the Year" (cutely referred to as "PotY" in-house). 67 products made it through to the final round of voting from the magazine's editors and reviewers—read Art Dudley's comments to find out who the winners are.
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,…
Much as I love his music and respect the role he played in helping to create what became country rock, the belief that Gram Parsons is God has, like most religions, a number of holes. Yes, the ever expanding Parsons star–crossed mythology has it all: a wealthy dissolute southern upbringing, a semester at Harvard, rock star drug buddies like Keith Richards, the discovery of Emmylou Harris, and of course the fatal OD at Joshua Tree. And while he is often credited as the guy who single–handedly brainstormed the mix of pedal steel and rock drumming, thanks mainly to his two superb solo records, a…
Maria Schneider, photographed by Jimmy & Dena Katz
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…
With increasing frequency, many audiophiles and industry professionals have accepted that the quest for highest-quality sound quality is a luxury and esoteric pursuit that, by its very nature, can appeal to only a small niche market. According to this view, the masses—the 99%, if you will—are either satisfied with Pioneer, Bose, Samsung, Dr. Dre, and iPhone/Android/tablet sound; can't tell the difference between quality and dreck; or will never have the money or imagination to move beyond lowest-common-denominator sound. To the extent that the vast majority knows anything about high-end…
James Brown: Love Power Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1971
Polydor/Sundazed 5470 (3 LPs). 2014. James Brown, prod., mix; Ron Lenhoff, eng., mix; Bob Irwin, mastering. AAA.? TT: 92:50
Performance *****
Sonics ***½
Polydor/Sundazed 5470 (3 LPs). 2014. James Brown, prod., mix; Ron Lenhoff, eng., mix; Bob Irwin, mastering. AAA.? TT: 92:50
Performance *****
Sonics ***½
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…
John Marks returned to the Bricasti M1 in December 2014 (Vol.37 No.12):
In my third report on the Bricasti M1—a Follow-Up in the July 2013 issue—I wrote: "If Stereophile has covered another product that has received as many upgrades in as brief a time as Bricasti's M1 DAC ([$9000]), I missed it." Since then, Bricasti has stayed on their path of "continuous innovation." I think it praiseworthy that all of Bricasti's M1 upgrades have been made available to owners of earlier models at reasonable cost or no cost at all. Not one Bricasti DAC has ever been rendered obsolete by a newer model.…
Sidebar: More Bits vs Greater Bandwidth
Contrary to what some industry pundits claim, the dividing line between "Red Book" and "hi-rez" audio is: 20-bit/44.1kHz—that is, 20 true bits, not mere nominal bits. I'm not saying that DSD, DXD, and 192kHz do not sound "better." I'm saying that most of the ills of "Red Book" sound can be traced back to its resolution of 16 bits. Resolution is more important than frequency response, I feel, in large measure because, for much program content, there isn't much musical information above 20kHz. For example, the workhouse rock'n'roll dynamic microphone…
The experience left me doubting my ears. After I'd performed all the measurements of Ayre Acoustics' KX-R preamplifier ($18,500) to accompany Wes Phillips's review in our November 2008 issue, I spent a weekend listening to it. To my astonishment, the sound of my system with a Transporter D/A processor feeding the preamplifier was better than when the DAC fed the power amplifier directly. Through the KX-R, images sounded more tangible, and the sound was better focused, despite the signal's having been passed through not just another set of interconnects but also through the preamp's input…