Reviewer's Addendum
Okay, we admit it. We probably were guilty of oldthink in our reaction to the Vestigial arm. There is no doubt but that tracking cleanness and record life are enhanced by reducing total system mass (or inertia) as much as possible, and that in this respect the Vestigial arm represents a substantial advance in the state of the phono art. It is also true of course that the compliance must be very high (as it is in the KLM) in order to place the resonance of the system at the optimum frequency (or frequencies when vertical and lateral mass are different).
But the…
Sidebar: Specifications
Description: Low-mass arm for use with high-compliance cartridges.
Price: $100 (1975); no longer available (2015).
Serial number of review sample: Un-numbered sample loaned by Music & Sound, Ltd., Willow Grove, PA.
Manufacturer: Transcriptors, Ireland. US Distributor: Transcriptors, 330 West 58th St., New York, NY 10019 (1975); Transcriptors Limited, Unit 10, Daybrook Business Centre, Daybrook, Notts. NG5 6AT, UK. Web: www.transcriptors.eu (2015).
Could it be that Jim James and My Morning Jacket are becoming a sly soul band? Hold on: make that a psychedelic rock outfit? Or is it orchestral jam pop this time out? And what about all those persistent prog-rock leanings?
The Waterfall is all that and yet it’s not. Well beyond becoming a moving target, MMJ have now solidly framed a house called singular. Here the Louisville band that started out as southern indie rockers, have gone all left coast sweeping and melodic which is appropriate for an album recorded in the Panoramic House above Stinson Beach in Marin County, an environment…
It's been almost exactly a year since I reported on the opening of a new store dedicated to high-performance audio and video in Unionville, Ontario. To mark the first anniversary of the store's opening, they had a party to celebrate the occasion.
Trevor Wong and Stacey Sniderman (right to left in the photo), owners of Update TV & Stereo Elevated (which I will just refer to as Update), have two more stores in the Greater Toronto Area, but these are more oriented toward home theater, whereas the Unionville store, while not slighting video and home theater, has a strong emphasis…
Paul Winter: Callings
The Paul Winter Consort: Paul Winter, soprano sax, E-flat contrabass sarrusophone, conch shell; Nancy Rumbel, oboe, English horn, C contrabass sarrusophone, double ocarina; Eugene Friesen, cello; Jim Scott, classical and 12-string guitars; Ted Moore, timpani, surdos, berimbau, caixixi, pao de chuva, ganza, gongs, cymbals, triangles, handbells, whistles; Paul Halley, pipe organ, harpsichord, piano.
Recorded with the 3M Digital System in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City. Paul Winter, prod., Dixon Van Winkle, Chris Brown, engs. Additional…
Meridian's MCD CD player was perhaps the first audiophile-quality player to be introduced in the high-end market. I met with Bob Stuart of Meridian at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in January, 1986 (footnote 1). My first question was about the name of the company he runs with industrial designer Alan Boothroyd:
J. Gordon Holt: Meridian in England is called Boothroyd Stuart, right?
Bob Stuart: Yes, the company is called Boothroyd Stuart, Limited, and the trademark is Meridian.
Holt: What is your function at Meridian? Sales, engineering, design, or what…
Holt: The audio and digital sections have their own supply?
Stuart: In the MCD there are separate regulated supplies for the servo, the digital, and the audio sections, but they share a common transformer and grounding system. In the Pro, the supplies for the servo and the D/A and audio section are completely separate. And we isolate the audio section from the RF section, which reduces the level of spurious ultrasonic material by at least 18dB.
Holt: You mean, much of that ultrasonic garbage was the result of electrical interference from the digital circuitry into the analog…
John Atkinson tried the PonoPlayer in balanced mode in June 2015, Vol.38 No.6):
A highlight of my reviewing year so far has been my experience of the PonoPlayer. When I reviewed this $399, high-resolution portable media player for the April 2015 issue, I was mightily impressed with what I heard and what I measured. But as I later wrote, in the May issue, I realized that I had not said enough in that review about the compelling nature of music played through the Pono. During a long airline flight, my attention kept being drawn to the music in a way that rarely happens with my iPod Classic…
Manufacturers' Comment
Editor: Hello to all Stereophile readers. I'd like to personally thank John Atkinson and the Stereophile crew for your appreciation of the PonoPlayer and what it delivers.
I first realized that Pono had to happen when it became clear to me that we had lost the connection with music with the dominance of MP3, downloading, and streaming. The goal for Pono was simple: bring the music back, for all of us. Realizing it, making it happen, was a bit more tricky.
As the community around Pono has grown—it currently approaches 43,000 people—we have learned…
Okay, we had a Rodgers & Hammerstein moment, but it was John Atkinson's review of KEF's bad-ass, made-in-England Blade Two loudspeaker, featured on the June 2015 issue's cover, that got us excited. And Art Dudley was also excited by the sound of another English speaker in this issue, the BBC-heritaged Super HL5plus from Harbeth. But it is AD's advice on how to audition cables that might generate the most excitement. Money quote: "I think that any 1m interconnect pair that sells for $5000 or more ought to sound amazingly, obviously good and increase the size and functionality of one's…
