This year, a host of Northern Californians have chosen to venture onto Highway 101, drive from nearby San Francisco International Airport, or shuttle from BART to attend the show…
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The California Audio Show returns to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Burlingame August 3–5. Produced by Constantine Soo's dagogo.com, and sponsored by Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, Wired.com, Audiophilevoice.com, AVshowrooms.com, and San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV.org), Northern California's only show aimed at audiophile consumers promises 36 exhibit rooms stocked with equipment from at least 100 manufacturers.
With the release of their first Binaural+ high-resolution downloads, Chesky Records and HDtracks intend to take music lovers one step closer to the real musical event. Made possible by work that composer David Chesky, founder of Chesky Records and cofounder of HDtracks, has been doing at Princeton University with Dr. Edgar Choueiri, Chesky's Binaural+ downloads make possible the playback of binaural recordings on both headphones and a pair of loudspeakers.
The Binaural+ masters are captured in high-resolution (24-bit/192kHz) sound using a Binaural head or Kunstkopf nicknamed "Lars," who…
Cardas Audio, one of the longest-established boutique audio-cable and accessories innovators, has brought George Cardas' frequency-sweep system-enhancement tweak, previously available on LP for more than 25 years from Cardas Audio and on CD from Ayre Acoustics, into the world of smartphone applications with the "Clarifier" app, available from iTunes' App Store for 99 cents. The app is for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) only; we don't know if an Android version is planned.
With its price tag obviously benefiting from both economies of scale and the lack of physical-delivery costs, Cardas' 99-…
Steve Shelley, rock-solid drummer of Sonic Youth and various other bands, has started a new record label called Vampire Blues. Releases will be available as LPs (with MP3 download cards) and as digital downloads. Will hi-res files be made available? We can hope.
The label’s first two offerings were released just a couple of days ago. Ancient Storm is the debut LP from Spectre Folk, led by Pete Nolan of Magik Markers and featuring Aaron Mullan on bass, Peter Meehan on guitar, and Shelley on drums. Bury the Kings is, I believe, Chris Lee’s fourth LP, and his first in nine years. This one…
Back in July 2011, we discussed the New Face of Vinyl. Young vinyl enthusiasts, Ben Meadors and Owen McCafferty, turned to Kickstarter to fund their dream of traveling across the country and meeting teens who were similarly interested in collecting and playing LPs. They met their goal of $6500 and made their way across the US, documenting every step along the way.
Now, Dust & Grooves’ Eilon Paz wants to document every face of vinyl. Paz, a Brooklyn-based photographer and vinyl enthusiast, plans to travel across the country, telling the great American story through its vinyl…
The first loudspeaker I heard from the Canadian company PSB was the Stratus, an affordably priced ($1400/pair), two-way tower with a soft-dome tweeter and an 8" woofer. The Stratus had benefited from designer Paul Barton's being able to use the anechoic chamber at the Canadian government's National Research Center, in Ottawa. The Stratus was reviewed for Stereophile by J. Gordon Holt in our May 1988 issue; he described the speaker as "eminently listenable," though Gordon also felt that it was "a little lacking in guts and liveliness." I had sat in on some of his listening sessions and had…
I investigated this by playing the half-step–spaced toneburst track on Editor's Choice (CD, STPH016-2) and listening to the cabinet sidewalls' behavior with a stethoscope. The cabinet was quite lively in the octave above middle C. Getting rid of the cones so that the Minis' hard rubber bases sat directly atop the stands reduced the effect of these resonances. Ultimately, I used small strips of Sorbothane between the speakers and the stands' top plates, which both tamed the cabinet's misbehavior and usefully fattened the upper bass a bit.
I then used the Mini's dedicated PFS-27 stands,…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, reflex-loaded bookshelf loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) ferrofluid-cooled, titanium-dome tweeter; 4" (102mm), clay/ceramic-filled, polypropylene-cone woofer. Crossover frequency: 2.2kHz. Crossover slopes: fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley. Frequency response: 55Hz–23kHz, ±3dB; –10dB at 50Hz. Sensitivity: 85dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Minimum impedance: 4 ohms. Power handling: 10–80W recommended, 60W program.
Dimensions: 9.25" (234mm) H by 5.75" (143mm) W by 8.375" (212mm) D. Internal volume: 0.1 cubic foot (2.8 liters). Weight…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog Sources: Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo power supply, Linn Ekos tonearm, Linn Arkiv B phono cartridge.
Digital Sources: Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP & DX-5 universal players; Apple 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini laptop running OS10.7, iTunes 10, Pure Music 1.86; Shuttle PC with Lynx AES16 soundcard & dual-core AMD Athlon processor running Windows 7, Foobar 2000, Adobe Audition 3.0; Musical Fidelity V-DAC II, Benchmark DAC1, Logitech Transporter, Mark Levinson No.30.6 D/A converters; Ayre Acoustics QA-9 USB A/D converter. Empirical Audio Off-Ramp 4…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I used DRA Labs' MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the PSB Imagine Mini's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. With its ¼" capsule, the Earthworks mike is small enough to not significantly affect the tuning of the port when used for a nearfield measurement.
As expected from its small size, the Imagine Mini is not very sensitive, my estimate coming in at 85.5dB(B)/2.83V/m. This is a couple of dB lower than average, but within experimental error of the…