Description: Two-way, three-driver, sealed-box, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: two 6.5" polypropylene-cone woofers, one front-firing, one rear; one 1" cermaic-coated silk-dome tweeter. Frequency response: 39Hz–20kHz, ±2dB. Sensitivity: 86dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 5 ohms. Maximum power handling: 300W.
Dimensions: 9.25" W by 4" D by 38" H. Weight: 33 lbs.
Standard finishes: walnut, black oak. Special finishes, $250 extra: piano black, curly or birdseye maple, rosewood, two-tone mixes.
Serial numbers of units reviewed: CA002196/97, first pair;…
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Sidebar 3: Specifications
All photographs by Lily Szabo Photography and used with permission
Thursday February 13 was a day most of us in New York would have preferred to stay indoors. With 10” of snow falling since the night before, the Stereophile office closed, the roads in my neighborhood impassable, and public transport iffy at best, I really didn’t want to make the trek into Manhattan. But I did and was glad to have done so. English loudspeaker manufacturer KEF, represented by a team led by the company's brand ambassador Johan Coorg (above right), was promoting a unique event for the press at MSR Studios on…
Keith Jarrett: Concerts: Bregenz München
Keith Jarrett, piano
ECM 1227–29 (3 CDs; also available as 24/96 files from HDTracks). 1982/2013. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Martin Wieland, eng. ADD. TT: 2:30:19
Performance *****
Sonics ****½
Keith Jarrett, piano
ECM 1227–29 (3 CDs; also available as 24/96 files from HDTracks). 1982/2013. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Martin Wieland, eng. ADD. TT: 2:30:19
Performance *****
Sonics ****½
Keith Jarrett's gift for brilliant invention is apparently inexhaustible throughout both of these concerts, recorded five days apart in spring 1981. The combinations of lyricism, literally foot-stomping gospel, chordings and voicings alternately sumptuously lush and astringently lean, and unexpected musical destinations reached in surprising ways…
Way back when, I met this maenad woman at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village and told her I was an artist. She told me she was an art collector and invited me to her loft to see her collection. While she was showing me an impressive assortment of African and contemporary art, she was dropping names: William Burroughs, Bob Marley, John Cage, etc. Hmmm . . . really? I spoke up. "Oh, I love John Cage. What was he like?"
She told me that Cage picked her up one day to go to an art party in the Hamptons. When they arrived, he said he needed her help putting batteries in a box full of transistor…
I well remember my first "real" headphones: a pair of Koss Pro4AAs that I bought back in 1970. The Kosses were relatively expensive, but, like headphones today, they allowed an audiophile with limited cash to get a taste of high-end sound that was not possible with a speaker-based system. I bought the Pro4AAs because I had become fascinated with how the images of the instruments and singers were strung along a line between my ears inside my head. It seemed so much more intimate—a more direct connection with the music—than playback through loudspeakers.
And in those early days of recording…
A track I played during my 2013 presentations at audio shows and audiophile-society meetings was Eriks Esenvalds' O Salutaris Hostia, from the album A Drop in the Ocean, by the Portland State Chamber Choir conducted by Ethan Sperry (16-bit/44.1kHz master file for CD, PDK-C-01). I had mastered this CD for Stereophile's Erick Lichte, who had both edited the recording and produced some of the sessions. Massed voices are very difficult for audio systems to reproduce, because the spectrally rich content is sensitive to intermodulation distortion. This can be particularly problematic with…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Circumaural (over-the-ear) headphones with planar-magnetic drive-units using neodymium magnets, and earpads of premium lambskin leather or leather-free, "microsuede" fabric. Supplied accessories: ADZ6SE cable (single-ended ¼" TRS to 2x4-pin mini XLR), ADZ6B4 cable (balanced 4-pin XLR to 2x4-pin mini XLR), ¼"-to-1/8" adapter, SKB travel case.
Cable length: 94" (2.5m). Weight: 37.5 oz. (600gm).
Serial number of unit reviewed: 7454038.
Price: $1699. Approximate number of dealers: >30.
Manufacturer: Audeze LLC,10725 Ellis Avenue, Unit…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Astell&Kern AK100 portable media player; Apple 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini laptop running OS10.7.5, iTunes 10, Pure Music 1.89, Audirvana Plus 1.5.10, JRiver Media Center 19 for Mac; Shuttle PC with Lynx AES16 soundcard & dual-core AMD Athlon processor running Windows 7, Adobe Audition 3.0; Arcam rBlink Bluetooth D/A converter; Auralic Vega D/A converter.
Headphone Amplifiers: HeadRoom BlockHead, Benchmark DAC1, ASUS Xonar Essence One Muses Edition, Meridian Prime with Prime power supply.
Headphones: Sennheiser HD650 & HD800.…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I don't measure headphone acoustic responses, as this requires a dummy-head-and-microphone system: see Keith Howard's article on this subject in the August 2008 issue. In addition, as Keith wrote, deciding what, precisely, is the optimal frequency response for a pair of headphones is neither obvious nor trivial.
I used Stereophile's vintage Audio Precision System One to measure the Audeze LCD-X's impedance and electrical phase (fig.1). The solid trace in this graph shows the impedance magnitude with the headphones mounted on my head facing my ears. The…
Beck's Morning Phase is available now. I don't own it yet, but I have added it to my ever-growing list of Records to Buy. (Other Music is already sold out. Otherwise, I'd indulge my preferred method of consuming music: I'd go there immediately and buy it from a kind person.)
According to a very trusted source, Morning Phase is excellent. Another source explains that, as with many of today's releases, the vinyl edition comes with a download code that grants the owner immediate access to the album as MP3 files. In this case, however, that MP3 edition is referred to as "The Vinyl Experience…