In the otherwise silly 2002 film The Banger Sisters, one line has always stood out. When the children of a groupie turned suburban Phoenix housewife (Susan Sarandon)…
With files sampled at 2x, 4x, or 8x the baseband rate of 44.1 or 48kHz, the information in…
Digital Sources: Mac mini (i7, 8GB RAM) running OSX El Capitan, Pure Music 3.06, Audirvana 1.5.
Headphone Amplifiers: Ayre Acoustics Codex, Simaudio Moon Neo 230HAD.
Preamplifier: None.
Power Amplifiers: Pass Labs XA60.5 monoblocks.
Headphones: Audeze LCD-X, AudioQuest NightHawk.
Loudspeakers: PSB Imagine T3, Crystal Cable Arabesque Minissimo Diamond Edition.
Cables: USB: AudioQuest Coffee. Interconnect: AudioQuest Fire (unbalanced) & Wild Blue (balanced). Headphone: Cardas Clear (balanced), manufacturers' own (unbalanced).…
And yet, at the same time, mindful of what often happens with tribute records, which is what in some ways this is, a competing thought also arose: everybody’s looking for a concept, might this one be too clever for its own good?
One time through The Young Philadelphians however and any doubts were extinguished. Here was a combination of accessible, ultra-familiar material twisted in new ways by Ribot’s ever vital, always surprising gifts for phrasing and tones, combined with a rhythm section made up of two Philly natives, bassist…
I reviewed this elegantly English D/A headphone amplifier in October 2014, with a Follow-Up in November 2015 (footnote 1). I was impressed with what I heard. Yes, at $2000, the Prime is relatively expensive—but, as I wrote, "I liked the palpable way it had with imaging and its clean, clear, but smooth highs."
Another aspect of the Prime that I liked was the fact that, with a firmware upgrade, it could decode and play MQA-encoded files. When this upgrade became available in spring 2016, I downloaded the firmware…
Editor: I read with interest, and not a little relief, Jason Victor Serinus's "As We See It" in the July issue of Stereophile.
Relief because, after we were forced to defer Salon Son et Image 2016 this year, various adverse and, in some cases, vile accusations were made. Why would we do such a thing? The truth is, no organizer of any worth has anything to gain by deferring or even canceling a show; the only genuine reason will be lack of trade support. That lack of support had to be influenced by the ongoing financial viability of this show, in the eyes of…
I deliberately chose not to include LP sales data, because I believe turntable sales data to be more valuable alone. These figures represent people discovering or rediscovering their newfound appreciation for turntables, rather than existing turntable owners listening to (or collecting) more LPs. It…
But more was in the cards for—and from—Thiel Audio. The company was sold in 2012 to a private equity company based in Nashville; soon thereafter Thiel Audio moved to that city from Lexington, Kentucky, where Jim had co-founded it in 1977. Thiel's longtime president, Kathy Gornik, left, and for a while the company'…
While the listening space, so treated—an ongoing project!—is far from dead, music played there has, for me, a pleasingly spacious quality, without obvious reverb or flutter echo. Bass support is good, if less dramatic than in my prior, fully enclosed 25' by 15.5' by 8' room with its lath-and-plaster walls…