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I know this will come as a huge shock to music fans the world over but the Grammy Awards get it wrong more than they get it right. No offense to the 2013 winners, but after repeated listens to the LP of Bakersfield, which was cut from a digital master, and the CD of the same record, (no high resolution download yet) it’s very clear that the best country record of 2013 was easily this delightful throwback that reminds you again, that once upon a time Nashville wasn’t the only game in the country universe. A lot of what is now thought of as “classic country” was written in California by the…
In his article on the future of audio engineering in this issue, John La Grou tells us—succinctly and correctly, I think—that we are rapidly moving from a culture of handheld devices to one of headworn devices. He postulates that by perhaps as early as 2025, rather than being actively sought out, most audio/video media will be delivered, like milk or the newspaper—but delivered not to our front doors, but more or less straight to our brains. Fascinating? Sure. Frightening? Kinda, yeah. I'm just getting used to Instagram (@stephenmejias), and now I have to prepare for InstaEverything—in my…
By comparison, the older model offered a brighter, edgier overall sound. Individual voices and instruments were slightly less well defined and not as precisely located on the soundstage. And, most significant, rhythm, pacing, and overall control suffered: Snare-drum strokes now evaporated too quickly, ride cymbals splashed where they shouldn't, and the drums seemed altogether a bit ahead of the music. It was as if the band were just a little anxious to get off the stage, whereas before they were content to groove and sway. The new DragonFly added the color, texture, body, and soul that the…
Sidebar: Contacts
AudioQuest, 2621 White Road, Irvine, CA 92614. Tel: (949) 585-0111. Web: www.audioquest.com.
PSB Speakers International, 633 Granite Court, Pickering, Ontario L1W 3K1, Canada. Tel: (905) 831-6555. Web: www.psbspeakers.com.
Sennheiser USA, 1 Enterprise Drive, Old Lyme, CT 06371. Tel: (860) 434-9190. Web: www.sennheiserusa.com.
In the wake of my October 2013 "Listening" column and its negative take on the Pete Riggle Woody tonearm (footnote 1), I was surprised and gratified by the offer of another new arm: a gesture of trust not unlike sending one's children to a sleepover at Casey Anthony's house. The supplier was Phillip Holmes, of Texas-based Mockingbird Distribution (footnote 2), and the new tonearm was the Abis SA-1, the design and manufacture of which was commissioned by the Japanese firm Sibatech, itself a distributor of dozens of high-end audio brands, including Zyx, Mactone, Zerodust, and, perhaps most…
Where the Abis gave it up to my transcription-length tonearms was, surprisingly or not, with mono records. The SA-1 did a good, enjoyable job with Johanna Martzy's recordings of J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin (3 LPs, (EMI/Electric Recording Company 33CX 1288), but didn't reach the same magical heights of artistic teleportation as the big arms. Ditto the recent mono release of Paul McCartney's spotty Ram (Apple/Hear Music HRM-334452-01), which sounded good, but not as chunky and forceful as it should: The superb Miyajima Mono simply gives more of itself when…
Referring to his former partner and his shall we say distinctive personality, Graham Nash once used the term, “Neilness” in front of me. That quality has been on public display in rarely seen quantities at South by Southwest 2014, the annual monster music fest in Austin, Texas where Young has launched his new high-resolution player and music store collectively known as PonoMusic. A Hawaiian word meaning “all one,” Pono is Young’s latest business concern to attack the problem of declining sound quality in recorded music. Many music fans and Young–O–philes will remember he was an early and…
After going so far off the beaten path in my last column, with examinations of digital signal processing (DSP) from miniDSP and Illusonic and multichannel in-room measurements, this month I take a look at and listen to a new preamplifier-processor from Yamaha, along with its companion multichannel power amplifier. The Japanese company (footnote 1) was a pioneer in digital signal processing (DSP) and multichannel sound, but for a long while now has been swimming in the mainstream of audio/video receivers and home theater.
Yamaha Aventage CX-A5000 preamplifier-processor
When I saw the…
I took the second option, and inserted the DSpeaker AntiMode 2.0 between the Yamaha and the subwoofers, set up as "Stereo Subs" to maintain the distinction between the "Front+Rear" subs established by the Yamaha. When I ran AntiMode's automatic correction routine (fig.2), the resulting sound was so good that I bit the bullet and ran XTZPro to develop correction filters for each sub, which I then copied into the filter set already arrived at by YPAO.
Fig.2 Before (blue) and after (red) implementation of bass equalization (16–120Hz) with the AntiMode 2.0 (5dB/vertical div.)…
By 2035, the way we produce and consume media will be entirely different from how we experience it now. Today there is still a "fourth wall" between us and the media we consume: within three decades, that line between reality and its recreation will all but disappear. Our media experiences will become fully immersive—from spherical audio and video that tracks with our body's movements, to gestural computing, to physical-feedback devices, and more. Using tomorrow's technology, our children and grandchildren may find it difficult to distinguish the real thing from reproduced.
Technology…