With the Aurender Flow's battery fully charged, I measured it with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 "As We See It"). Sources were TosLink from the SYS2722, USB from my 2012 MacBook Pro (running on battery power), or USB from my iPad 2 via the camera connection kit. Macintosh's USB Prober utility reported the Flow's product string as "Aurender-FLOW-6027 Output" and the manufacturer string as "XMOS." USB Prober also confirmed that the Flow's USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The TosLink input locked…
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Ornette Coleman, the great alto saxophonist and composer, died yesterday at the age of 85. His great jazz quartet of the late 1950s and early '60s—with Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins (sometimes alternating with Ed Blackwell) on drums—revolutionized jazz, shifting it away from chord changes to structures built more around melody, rhythm, and harmonic suggestions not confined by set chord changes. And while some of his followers may have descended into noisy chaos, Ornette himself rarely went that route and, in fact, in the '90s, stepped up to a new level…
Edgy, otherworldly and utterly singular and unique. It was the acting of Christopher Lee and the music of Ornette Coleman.
Some conjunctions are just too momentous to be a coincidence, and the powerful loss of saxophonist Ornette Coleman and actor Sir Christopher Lee, on the same day, Thursday, June 11, 2015, seems connected. Both lived long lives and became masters of their craft. Both made their reputations dabbling in what amounts to a kind of science fiction, Lee by playing supernatural characters and Coleman by playing music often charitably described in the beginning as being alien…
Bel Canto's extraordinary Black amplification system is featured on the cover. Combining state-of-the-art class-D monoblocks with an all-digital preamplifier, the Black sounds and measures as good as it can get. At a price, of course—but at the other end of the price spectrum, we review Creek's Evolution 100A integrated amplifier, as complete in its way as the Black is in its. These are not your father's amplifiers.
Emotiva's new XMC-1 preamplifier/processor, which incorporates the Dirac room-correction software is featured in "Music in the Round," while on the analog playback side, two…
Michael Murray: Encores à la Française
Works by Couperin, Dupré, Gigout, Franck, Widor, J.S. Bach, Vierne, Lemmens
Organ at Symphony Hall, Boston
Telarc Digital DG10069 (LP), 80104 (CD, released in 1990). Robert Woods, prod., Elaine Martone, assistant prod., Jack Renner, eng. TT: 65:46 (CD).
Organ at Symphony Hall, Boston
Telarc Digital DG10069 (LP), 80104 (CD, released in 1990). Robert Woods, prod., Elaine Martone, assistant prod., Jack Renner, eng. TT: 65:46 (CD).
This is another winner. Michael Murray's superior performances are or should be well known to all by this time. This recording of Encores in the French style covers a wide gamut of registration and mood, ranging from the large and full-blown sonorities of Franck's Pièce Héroique, the Toccata…
The summer of 1975 will be remembered by us, with no fondness whatsoever, as The Time the Roof Fell In. Or the Murphy Months, or the Period of the Plague Upon Our House.
Ye Editor can recall from the days of WWII hearing and reading about the depredations of some mischievous sprites called Gremlins, who would cause aircraft hatchcovers to jam and control cables to get hung up at the worst possible moment, but I don't think I ever really did believe in Gremlins. I think I sensed somehow that the mishaps attributed to their malevolent machinations were too capricious to be the work of…
LAST (Liquid Archival Sound Treatment) is a record treatment developed by one Dr. Catalano, which promises to retard dramatically the wear of vinyl discs. I don't feel that the advent of true digital discs will diminish the importance of LAST; on the contrary, as this century comes to a close many stereo records will be in their 30s and 40s and in need of as much preservation as possible, if the sounds and performances we treasure are to be preserved.
After perusing the reprints of reviews in other under-grounders, supplied by LAST at their CES booth (all raves, needless to say), I was…
Manufacturer's Comment
Editor: Thank you for the opportunity to review your article, re: LAST, prior to publication. You are very kind to allow me such an opportunity. I do not blame anyone for being "fuddled" by thermodynamic concepts. I personally had a great deal of difficulty in learning the little I know about the general subject. And, although I have taught chemical thermodynamics a number of times, it is still difficult for me to do so and extremely difficult for students of either physics or chemistry to grasp the concepts on a deep, basic level. I consider the concepts of…
By now most readers will be familiar with the relatively new tuned-cavity method of low-frequency loading. Such designs have popped up all over the place of late, especially in those little satellite/woofer systems, but KEF can rightly lay claim to generating the design's theoretical basis, as JA described in his review of the KEF R107/2 loudspeaker in Vol.14 No.5 (May 1991). Essentially, the technique consists of loading the rear of a woofer in a conventional fashion—usually a sealed box—but also loading the front of the driver into another enclosure, ducted to the outside. Basically, the…
Sidebar 1: Equipment
Four power amplifiers were used in the course of this evaluation: the Threshold S/550e, the Mark Levinson No.23.5, the Audio Research Classic 120 monoblocks, and the PS Audio 100 Delta. The preamplifier was the Rowland Consummate, and the CD player was the Wadia WT-3200 driving the Audio Research DAC1-20 converter. (CD was the primary source in this audition.)
Interconnects were AudioQuest Lapis between CD and preamp and for the unbalanced link between preamp and power amp with the ARC and PS Audio amps. For balanced hookup to the Threshold and Levinson…