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Writing about music and the music business is one thing. Actually being a part of the business is another. Years ago I subscribed to the policy that if I ever begin to utter phrases like “I want to manage a band” or “I want to own a club,” then my loved ones are to assume I have slipped into some sort of dangerous delusionary haze and act accordingly. The music business is, in a phrase, a young man’s game. And in that game I recently found one of my favorite intrepid young men, former Stereophile editorial assistant, Ariel Bitran who is now running a music venue in the gentrifying before-your…
Just three months after buying 13 vintage record presses, Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds (above) has purchased The Mastering Lab (TML), the legendary facility of Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer, Doug Sax. Sax, who died of cancer on April 2 at the age of 78, opened TML in Hollywood on December 27, 1965 with his older brother, Sherwood, and his music arranger/pianist friend from high school, Lincoln Mayorga.
Using handcrafted tube electronics designed by his brother, Sax soon became known for mastering The Doors' debut album. By 1972, he was mastering 20% of Billboard magazine's top…
This is the front end of the system Essential Audio of Barrington, IL be using on Saturday June 27 and Sunday, June 28, 2015 to demonstrate Bricasti Design's M1 DAC (top right) and M28 monoblock amplifiers. Guest of honor will be Bricasti Design president Brian Zolner, who will be demonstrating and talking about his products. Essential Audio is the first US dealer to have the new Aurender N10 music server (top left), which will be on demonstration with the Bricasti components.
The event takes place 1pm to 5pm each day and refreshments will be provided. RSVPs are recommended. For details…
Vivaldi: L'Estro Armonico: 12 Concertos for Violins, Op.3
Rachel Podger, Bojan Cicic, Johannes Pramsohler, violin; Brecon Baroque, Rachel Podger
Channel Classics CCS SA 36515 (2 SACD/CDs). 2015. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, prod.; Jared Sacks, eng.; Ernst Coutinho, asst. eng. DDD. TT: 96:54
Performance *****
Sonics *****
Rachel Podger, Bojan Cicic, Johannes Pramsohler, violin; Brecon Baroque, Rachel Podger
Channel Classics CCS SA 36515 (2 SACD/CDs). 2015. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, prod.; Jared Sacks, eng.; Ernst Coutinho, asst. eng. DDD. TT: 96:54
Performance *****
Sonics *****
It's no big secret that classical music is in trouble. At a time when selling a few hundred CDs will land you squarely in the upper reaches of the classical music chart, and the venerable New York Philharmonic faces an unsettled future in terms of its…
A decade ago, my mother, on noticing a copy of Stereophile on my kitchen counter, asked me, "Are you still into that sound stuff?" Her tone had a touch of exasperation.
"Geez, Mom. I've been an audiophile for 15 years. This isn't a phase I'm going to outgrow."
Instead of motherly empathy, I got a slight smirk and a retort: "But it's always the same thing."
Until recently, I'd begun to think that Mom may have had a point: The audiophile pursuit—mine, at least—was beginning to feel a bit samey: Get tired of component A, buy a possibly better-sounding, likely more expensive…
Robert Deutsch reviewed the TD712zMK2 in July 2015 (Vol.38 No.7):
Of the speakers I've reviewed over the years, one stands out as being the most unusual, and I remember it with particular fondness: Fujitsu Ten's Eclipse TD712z. Looking like something that would be at home aboard the Starship Enterprise, this egg-shaped, single-driver speaker distinguished itself by its transparency, resolution, soundstaging, and lack of coloration. While no match for any number of comparably priced (or less expensive) multidriver speakers in bass extension and maximum attainable loudness, the strengths of…
There's nothing new under the sun, or so we are told. Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, a British designer named Tom Fletcher upset the audio status quo with a turntable that combined otherwise-familiar elements in a manner that was, at the very least, new with a lower-case n. Fletcher's product, the Space Deck, was perhaps the first original design in British phonography since the Roksan Xerxes of 1985; and his company, Nottingham Analogue, went from nothing to something in no time at all.
Key to the Space Deck's performance was the pairing of two seemingly incompatible components: a…
That said: Beginning just a few days into the test period, there were three times when I started the platter spinning in the prescribed manner, dropped needle into groove, and noted at once that the speed was distinctly too slow. On each of those occasions I then lifted the tonearm, placed the 7" test record gently atop the 331/3rpm record I was attempting to hear, and measured a rotational speed of about 26rpm—which, in musical terms, produces notes that sound a full fourth below the intended pitch. The effect was to make Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending sound like a romance for…
Stereophile normally doesn't review audio systems. We review individual components. We've made an exception for the Bel Canto Black system because it deserves to be evaluated as such. It consists of three dense, almost identically sized cases of black-anodized aluminum. One, the ASC1 Asynchronous Stream Controller, is what in a conventional system would be called a "preamplifier." The other two, a pair of MPS1 Mono PowerStreams, would in a conventional system be called "monoblock power amplifiers."
However, the Black does not comprise conventional components. The ASC1 accepts AES, two S/…
While I found it mostly smooth sailing, at one point the Ethernet connection between the ASC1 and the JRiver player on my computer broke, making inaccessible hundreds of great files I'd wanted to play from an external drive—all I got was sound from the computer speakers. Nothing I could think of doing solved the problem. I ended up shutting down and restarting the ASC1, but only after half an hour of hair-pulling frustration.
Computer audio is still in a messy state of glitches, unreliability, and nonstandardization. It's something everyone involved in it faces, and everyone wishing to…