It was with great interest, therefore, that I read Part I of Bill Sommerwerck's monster headphone survey in the March 1991 issue, as well as Gary A. Galo's report on Joseph Grado's HP 1s elsewhere in this…
search
I do quite a bit of headphone listening during the day, making use of their convenience to shut out the office hubbub while I get down to serious copy editing. The system I use is modest—a pair of no-longer-available Sennheiser HD420SLs driven by an Advent 300 receiver I bought for $75, with CD source provided by a Denon DCD-1500 II—but I get quite a bit of musical satisfaction from it.
Sidebar: Measurements
Measuring headphones is fraught with practical problems, mainly due to the fact that the target response for a drive-unit that fires straight into the ear canal is anything but flat, given the frequency-response–modifying natures of the pinnae and inner ear canal which, as mentioned earlier, are unique for each person. Fig.1, extracted from an excellent 1980 AES paper (footnote 1) from Audio Contributing Editor Jon Sank, shows the envelope of responses he found desirable for conventional headphones to sound flat.
For this review, I measured the responses of…
The August 2016 issue of Downbeat includes the results of its 64th annual Critics Poll, and, as usual, I'm in accord with some picks, in discord with others. (I should say, I started to cast my votes in the poll, but something went wrong with the server halfway through and I never got back on.)
Many of the results are strange, as democratic theory would predict of any poll that involves many candidates. (It's conceivable, for instance, that the winner of a category might be someone who was nobody's #1 choice: maybe this musician was everyone's #2, but the picks for #1 were so split, among…
Michael Fremer may be Stereophile's Mr. Analog but he was mightily impressed with the Moon 780D digital processor from Simaudio, which never meets a source of data it can't turn into music. Herb Reichert gets excited by an affordable tube preamp from Rogue, as does Fred Kaplan over an expensive VTL tube preamp; and Art Dudley and John Atkinson get much musical enjoyment from Sony and PSB speakers, respectively. And as well as our regular "Analog Corner," "Listening," "Gramophone Dreams," "Aural Robert," and "Industry Update" columns, Sasha Matson interviews Ayre's Charley Hansen—the "Wizard…
It was 89°outside at 11am on the opening day of Capital Audiofest in Rockville, MD, a day when the high temperatures were predicted to reach the mid-90s—the show continues today and tomorrow. One could be forgiven for asking: why not spend the day at an audio show in a nice, newly renovated, air-conditioned hotel?
Why not, indeed. There are 58 individual exhibits here, representing God-only-knows-how-many different brands: Munich High End it ain't, but then Munich isn't a 25-minute Metro ride from our nation's endearingly dysfunctional capital.
And look! Here it was, a full hour…
I assumed they called this delightful, human-scaled, audio exposition Capital Audiofest because it is held near our Nation's capital in Rockville, MD—but alas, I think I was mistaken. It appears it is because every sleeping, exhibition, or conference room at the Rockville Hilton had a big digitized photo of some Roman Corinthian capitals—every one! Or perhaps that is just some sly, tongue in cheek, ironic illusion to "All roads lead to . . ." But I was not mistaken about the delightful and human-scaled part. Founder and organizer Gary Gill has open arms and a big smile that always makes…
I like the out-of-the-ordinary, possibly because I have been disappointed by the ordinary often enough that I'm not uncomfortable looking elsewhere. So I'll admit up-front that I was predisposed toward enjoying Larsen loudspeakers, from Sweden, which are designed to perform their best, not in an anechoic chamber but in a real room, when positioned up against a real wall. Even that bit of psychological preconditioning didn't prepare me for how impressed I was by the Larsen 8 ($7000/pair), driven by a GamuT Di150 integrated amplifier ($13,990), itself fed by a Pear Audio Blue Kid Howard…
Think hip, young, handsome, and smart—with (maybe) some grease under his fingernails. Besides being one of my favorite loudspeaker manufacturers, Zu Audio's Sean Casey and his daughters restore vintage motorcycles. Sean is also a dancing party guy with a pile of records that follows him around like dust follows Pig Pen. And . . . he's a Left Coast guy that gets to hang with mellow smart dudes like Nelson Pass (Pass Labs).
At CAF Sean was knee deep in vinyl demonstrating his Definition Mk.IV loudspeakers ($12,500/pair in Hickory wood), He was using a beyond-super-cool vintage Luxman PD444…
To hear the system demonstrated by The Voice That Is—Tidal Audio Piano Diacera G2 loudspeakers ($39,990 in midnight black), Tidal Preos-D preamp ($31,190), Tidal Impulse stereo amplifier ($32,290), Bricasti M1se DAC ($10,000), Aurender N10 server ($7999), and Brinkmann Spyder turntable ($12,000) with that company's 10.5 tonearm ($5490) and EMT-ti cartridge ($3990)—was to conclude, on the basis of that experience and previous experiences with systems put together by proprietor Doug White, that the man is utterly incapable of making bad sound. Although I assume it took alot of after-hours,…
At 5pm on a Thursday, some Thursdays ago, Robert Baird and I embarked on a post-work record hunt in Brooklyn. More specifically, we explored Williamsburg, otherwise referred to as "Hipster Land" (footnote 1). Aside from being an all-round neat neighborhood, Williamsburg is also home to quite a few record shops. This trip, we decided to keep our stops to a minimum and focus on two of our favorites: Rough Trade (64 N 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249) and Earwax Records (167 N 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211).
First stop: Rough Trade
Rough Trade is an all-in-one, two-floor kingdom of…