The CD of Real Enemies (his third album, all of them on the New Amsterdam label) is out now, and having now taken those extra listens, I can drop the "maybe"…
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Almost a year ago, I wrote in this space about Darcy James Argue's Real Enemies, a multimedia big-band spectacle making its debut at BAM's New Wave Festival in Brooklyn. I called it "a remarkable work, maybe an oddball masterpiece," but added that—owing to its intricacies and its flashy visual elements (15 screens of text and images from news clips and Cold War movies)—I'd need "a few more listens" to grasp the music's full measure.
It’s amazing the scorn for the Beatles solo work that the release of the new Live at The Hollywood Bowl has unleashed on the web. Okay, so the sum of the parts was undoubtedly better than the individual voices. But once the band broke up, the break was irrevocable. No matter how much anyone wished or still wishes, The Beatles were finished. No one’s ever said it better than George Martin in the original back cover liner for the original LP issue of the Hollywood Bowl record:
"Those who clamour for a Beatle reunion cannot see that it can never be the same again.”
So John, Paul,…
The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is set to begin this Friday, October 7, from noon to 7 pm, in the mostly remodeled Denver Marriott Tech Center. The three-day audio show, which ends on October 9 at 4pm, promises 128 exhibit rooms, 32 vendor displays, plus three more in the parking lot (including the fabled Sony Magic Bus), 332 exhibit companies, and, at 62 exhibits, the largest CanJam ever.
Although participation is down by perhaps 30 rooms from the show's high—see below for the reasons why—RMAF seems poised to maintain its reputation as the North American audio show with the most product…
Last week, I experienced what may have been the greatest day of my life so far: the day I got to see Sir Elton John live in concert for the first time. This happened on September 27, 2016, in Allentown, PA.
Elton was joined by his usual band: Davey Johnstone (musical director, guitars, mandolin, banjo, vocals), Matt Bissonette (bass, vocals), Kim Bullard (keyboards), John Mahon (percussion, drums, vocals), and Nigel Olsson (drums, vocals).
It seems so simple—if you're a fan of a current performing artist, all you need to do is pay a large sum of money and you'll be granted semi-…
Thanks to two developments and a promise, the compact cassette has finally become, as they say, a force to be reckoned with.
Development one, perhaps the most significant factor in the changing picture, is the ready availability of B-type Dolby devices (which are single-band Dolbys, acting only on hiss frequencies). Advent makes two that can be used with any tape machine, cassette or otherwise, while Fisher, Advent, and Harman-Kardon (as of this moment) are producing cassette recorders with built-in Dolby-B. No doubt there will be others by the time this gets in print.
We have…
"They're so damn hard to tell apart!"
So exclaimed my longtime pal and fellow audiophile Bruce Rowley when I revealed to him that T+A Elektroakustik's new DAC 8 DSD digital-to-analog converter ($3995) had arrived for review, just after I'd finished writing up the Ayre Acoustics Codex DAC–headphone amp ($1795). Bruce had recently compared his own brand-new Codex with a DAC he'd owned for a couple years, both costing about the same but built to very different designs. He was surprised that, after carefully matching levels and working to eliminate any other variables, they sounded more…
But as we saw earlier, with filters there's always a trade-off—and in this case it's a gradual rolloff in frequency response that starts at 12–15kHz at low sampling rates (44.1 or 48kHz). And so T+A provides another Bézier filter: an interpolator plus an infinite impulse response (IIR) correction stage that combines a very good impulse response (not as good as the pure Bézier, though) with a very accurate and flat frequency response at high frequencies. The filter rolloff is less of a problem at higher sampling rates. Again, pick your poison.
In all cases, T+A says it uses 56-bit data…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: D/A processor with four selectable oversampling algorithms for PCM playback (FIR kurz, FIR lang, Bézier, Bézier/IIR) and DSD Direct DSD Signal Path via T+A True 1-bit converter. Analog outputs: high level (RCA), 2.5V with 22 ohms output impedance; balanced (XLR), 5.0V with 44 ohms output impedance. Digital inputs: 4 S/PDIF coaxial, 1 optical TosLink, 1 AES/EBU, all handling 16/24-bit data at sample rates from 32kHz to 192kHz;1 USB (Device mode) USB Class 2 Mode; support for asynchronous data transfer; PCM Mode, 16/24/32-bit data with sample rates…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Apple MacBook Pro computer (2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) running OS 10.11.5, Roon v.1.2 Build 142, JRiver Media Center 19, iTunes 12, Amarra Computer Music Player, VLC, Reaper 5.20.100, XLD; Western Digital NAS device (2TB); Oppo BDP-103 universal BD player; Meridian Sooloos Control 15 & QNAP TS-669 Pro NAS; Apple iPad Air & iPhone 6; Benchmark DAC1 USB & DAC2 HGC DACs, Ayre Acoustics QB-9DSD & Codex digital processors; AudioQuest DragonFly USB DAC.
Preamplifier: Marantz AV7005 in Pure Direct Mode.
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Sidebar 3: Measurements
I measured the T+A DAC 8 DSD with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It"). Sources were either digital signals fed via AES/EBU or TosLink from the SYS2722, or WAV and AIFF test-tone files played with Pure Music 3.0 on my MacBook Pro running on battery power and fed via USB. Apple's USB Prober utility identified the processor as the "DAC 8 DSD HD-AUDIO" from "T+A ELEKTROAKUSTIK," and confirmed that the T+A's USB input operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The AES/EBU and S/PDIF inputs accepted data sampled at up to…