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I think the Bryston SP-3's analog performance is the secret sauce of this wonderful pre-pro—its qualities shone through regardless of whether I used digital or analog sources, and whether or not they were processed. (What else, besides the analog outputs, is common to all the SP-3's functions?) In addition, by including absolutely no video processing save for stripping the audio signal from the HDMI input, the Bryston SP-3 avoids having the added noise from those higher-frequency processes bouncing around inside the chassis. As a byproduct of not having any video processing, the Bryston's…
Sidebar: Contacts
Bryston Ltd., PO Box 2170, 677 Neal Drive, Peterborough, Ontario K9J 6X7, Canada. Tel: (800) 632-8217, (705) 742-5325. Fax: (705) 742-0882. Web: bryston.com.
Electrocompaniet AS, Breivikveien 7, 4120 Tau, Norway. Tel: (47) 51741033. Fax: (47) 51741010. US distributor: Electrocompaniet Inc. 97 Linden Street, Oakland, CA 94607. Tel: (510) 291-1222. Web: www.electrocompaniet.com.
The Audiophile Tree of Life—a present from AudioStream's Michael Lavorgna. This guy watches over me while I listen to music.
In May, I exchanged a few e-mails with Wojciech Pacula, editor of the Polish online magazine, High Fidelity.
We discussed publishing, music, hi-fi, and life. (I can’t believe I didn’t mention Natalie, Nicole, the Mets, or beer.) You can read the interview here. There are also lots of pictures of my listening room and gear, which you might find interesting.
Pacula did a great job with the images and the translation. I don’t look or sound too…
The KLF's awesome 1990 masterpiece, Chill Out, the latest album featured at Classic Album Sundays.
Reader Robert Stewart shares “A King’s Ransom from Queens,” a truly remarkable, eclectic record collection soon to be available from Amoeba Records.
Eddie, the previous owner of the records, was a true record collector, but not in the sense of the must-own or traditional market-driven collectible pieces and sought-after titles. Instead he was a curator of alluring oddities, deviating from the mainstream and submersing himself in what he himself liked to listen to, always with…
On Monday, July 2, 2012, Beats Electronic LLC, the company most popular for their bass-bumping and market-dominating Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, announced their acquisition of on-demand music service MOG, a music streaming service that offers users access to over 16 million songs via wired or wireless connection.
MOG users can access their vast library of music and user-created playlists through an internet browser-based website platform, connection to a streaming device on a home network like the Logitech Squeezebox Touch, or by streaming to a mobile device. Speaking of mobile…
I was late getting to the Show, thanks to congested traffic on the Staten Island Expressway, congested traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, congested traffic on I-95 in Delaware; in fact, only when I reached the new MD200 tollway for the last 15 miles did the traffic ease up. The Capital Audiofest is not like other shows, which was emphasized when I finally walked into the atrium of Rockville, MD’s Crowne Plaza Hotel. There was show organizer Gary Gill wailing on trombone in a set of free jazz with drummer Kirk Kubicek Jr. and bass player Harry Walker. Walker was playing/stroking/tapping a…
I started off Saturday morning at the Capital Audiofest by revisiting Salon II in the Crowne Plaza’s atrium, where I chatted with AIX Records’ Mark Waldrep. Recently the subject of a fascinating interview on AudioStream.com, Mark has been a voluble and ubiquitous advocate of high-resolution surround-sound recordings. At CAF, however, he was using headphones to demonstrate his AIX recordings. But with a difference—to the left of my photo you can see a Smyth Realiser, which allows full surround-sound to be experienced on headphones (see “Music in the Round,” November 2010). On the DVD-R…
Back in the atrium, I set myself up with a Newkie Brown and a surprisingly good bowl of gumbo and sat back to listen to the set from Janel Leppin and Anthony Pirog, on electrified cello and electric guitar. Anthony, of course, has the 21st Century guitarist's usual battery of delay pedals, loop units, fuzz boxes, swell pedals, of course but so did Janel! She alternated long, lyrical melodic lines with strummed and pizzicato accompaniments, the two players creating ambient soundscapes reminiscent of what Robert Fripp was doing 20 years ago but with the cello adding a more human element. After…
Lunch and live music both over, it was time to head back to the exhibits. First stop on the third floor was one of the rooms from Metro Washington DC retailer Command AV, featuring DeVore Fidelity’s Orangutan/96 speakers ($12,000/pair). Combining the unorthodox coupling of a 1” silk-dome tweeter with a 10” paper-cone woofer in a stunningly finished, wider-than-it-is deep enclosure, the O/96 offers a equally stunningly high sensitivity of 96dB/W/m. I had heard the O/96s at Artie Dudley’s a couple of weeks back and was impressed by how the O/96 matched the midrange magic of vintage speakers…
As you can see from the massive 1930s cinema-style horn system that graced the Crowne Plaza’s Salon I, there was a significant retro vibe to the 2012 Capital Audiofest, something that became clear as I started my sweep of the second-floor rooms.
I had already come across a couple of examples of the vibe on other floors, including this classic combination of a vintage Jensen supertweeter, a horn-loaded Western Electric compression driver, and a Western Electric/Jensen 15” woofer in a custom cabinet ($44,000/pair) in the Deja Vu room. Driven by a Deja Vu Vintage Collection 349…