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These live performances of…

Yesterday, I played a minor role in a dustup on Facebook. It began when a fellow journalist posted a controversial quote from a veteran manufacturer known for generating same. The bait proved irresistible, and a long line of audio mavens, myself included, swam around the hook for an hour or so. The manufacturer himself also waded in, and before the fight was over, he'd made a show of demanding the home address of one of his antagonists, thus raising the manly specter of bodily harm. If there were any…

To fresh your memory, the data on Red Book CDs is limited to a sample rate of 44.1kHz—44,100 samples of data per second—and has a word length of 16 digital bits per sample. This yields a range of 65,536 possible…

Here’s the trick to show reporting: accomplish as much as possible ahead-of-time.

Thus my decision, while riding the Amtrak train from Albany, NY to Montreal for this year’s Salon Son et Image, to write about the journey itself, and to illustrate my post with a photo of something I’d seen along the way.

But that turned out to be easier said than done. Photographing beaver lodges, ice-fisherman, or even the bald eagles one sees on this route is tricky, especially when the train is moving, which it…

Stravinsky himself might have approved. While putting the final touches on the symphony, he wrote a four-hand piano arrangement of Rite and played it with Debussy (now that would be a long-lost recording worth…

The UMT+ is built around Oppo's BDP-103 Universal Network 3D Blu-ray player—a great place to start, and a player I'd already had in my video system for a year. All of the Oppo's playback abilities are retained (including the ability to apply Oppo update…

Description: Multiformat disc player. Disc formats supported: Blu-ray, SACD, HRx, DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, CD, more. Audio formats supported: WAV, FLAC, DSD 64x, MP3, Dolby Digital HD, DTS HD, more. External media connections: USB ports (3), computer network streaming. UPnP/DLNA compatible: Yes. DLNA DMR compatible: No. Outputs (audio): coaxial, TosLink, balanced AES/EBU, MSB PRO I2S (32-bit). Multichannel outputs: coaxial, TosLink, HDMI for connection to surround-sound processor. Analog audio outputs: none. Video outputs: 2 HDMI 1.4a up to 1080p; coaxial, composite…

Tiring of dropping receivers off our building's roof or ramming TVs (tied to the back of a pickup truck) into the shop's brick wall, Tom soon discovered that one of our customers…

Serious Listening
First things first: I wanted to establish the proper volume setting for listening and all of my comparisons. John Atkinson had recently sent me Benchmark's new, highly regarded DAC2 HGC, which has a…

Description: Solid-state D/A processor with outboard power supply. Inputs (three slots): choice of coaxial, TosLink, balanced AES/EBU, MSB network PROi2S, or USB; one pair of analog inputs on RCA jacks. Analog outputs: one pair single-ended RCAs, one pair balanced on XLRs. Volume control (optional): 1dB stepped attenuator (78 steps). Sampling frequency: 32–384kHz. Bit depth: 32. DSD: 64x, 128x. Maximum output level: 2.62V RMS, single-ended and balanced. Output impedance: 53 ohms, single-ended, 106 ohms, balanced, without volume control; 38 ohms, single-ended, 76…