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I beg your indulgence. CAS 2012 gave Northern Californians their first opportunity to hear Wilson Audio's imposing Alexandria XLF loudspeaker ($199,500/pair). The latest and grandest statement of Dave Wilson's engineering acumen—he designed the crossover and supervised the voicing, for starters—the 97dB-sensitive Alexandria XLF powered by the 600W VTL Siegfried Series II Reference monoblocks ($65,000/pair), together with the not-really-necessary but it sure makes its mark in such a large room Wilson Audio Thor's Hammer subwoofer ($21,500) and a front end whose cutting-edge technology and…
You can interpret the title of this blog in many ways. Speaking personally as a Bay Area resident, it means coming into the home stretch of the California Audio Show knowing that there are a host of dealers, distributors, and manufacturers in Northern California who are in love with music and dedicated to high quality music reproduction. It also means, in the literal sense, that CAS 3 included a number of systems that got to the heart of music reproduction.
One of those was Bob Hodas' room. Shown in part with recording, mixing, and mastering engineer Piper Payne, who also works with the…
In a sense, I understand why Thelonious Monk's albums on Columbia, recorded between 1962 and 1968, have been neglected. His earlier sessions, on Blue Note, Prestige, and Riverside, were the ones where he introduced his classic songs, developed his eccentric style, and played with star-studded rhythm sections. The six quartet albums for Columbia feature a total of just six new Monk songs. And they find him playing with a working band of accompanists—no John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, or Roy Haynes here.
Yet the Columbias—Monk's Dream, Criss-Cross, It's Monk's…
It was another flawlessly beautiful spring morning, and I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to help John Atkinson pack up the Lansche Audio 5.1 loudspeakers ($41,000/pair). John had only just completed his listening and bench tests (see his review in the July issue), and was not ready to let go of the lovely Lansches—but the speakers would be picked up by a trucking company that afternoon and sent to our cover photographer, Eric Swanson, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each Lansche measures 40.9" tall by 10.1" W by 19.3" D and weighs 167.5 lbs—packing them and securing them to a shipping pallet is…
The SM 45 has a 1" aluminum-dome tweeter and a 5.25" mid/woofer, the latter utilizing DefTech's patented Balanced Double Surround System (BDSS), in which the driver's cone is supported at both its inner and outer edges, for longer excursion. The large, unusual-looking knob at the center of the mid/woofer is DefTech's new Linear Response Waveguide. This is designed to create wide dispersion and a smooth frequency response off axis, so that you don't have to be strapped into a narrow "sweet spot" to enjoy good sound—great for listening (and dance) parties.
I was also immediately impressed…
Sidebar Contacts
Definitive Technology: 11433 Cronridge Drive, Suite K, Owings Mills, MD 21117-2294. Tel: (410) 363-7148. Fax: (410) 363-9998. Web: www.definitivetech.com
Timbre Sound, LLC, dba Thinksound, 350 Route 108, Suite 204, Somersworth, NH 03878. Web: www.thinksound.com
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Fantasy Symphony Season competition, announced in this column in February, has been a smashing success—as far as I'm concerned, it's the most worthwhile write-in competition yet. The 13 winning entries and one hors-concours laureate are posted in the follow-up to February's column on Stereophile's website. The update lists the compositions in each winning Fantasy Symphony Season entry. I created a spreadsheet to determine the most popular composers and works in the…
A prodigy who wrote his first oratorio at 11, famed film composer Nino Rota studied with Alfredo Casella at the Santa Cecilia Academy, in Rome. Toscanini encouraged Rota to come to America, where he won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute; his teachers there included Fritz Reiner. Rota's more than 150 film credits include Fellini's 81?2, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, and two of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films. I had been dimly aware that Rota had written "serious" music, but had never sought it out until prompted by a reader's entry. My mistake. Everything on this CD is excellent…
Last December, I posted a swooning review of Acoustic Sounds' two-disc, 45rpm, 200-gram Quality Records Pressings of Ella & Louis, the 1956 Verve album of duets with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis, and Buddy Rich), which may be the most delightful vocal album ever—and, in this pressing, perhaps the most amazing-sounding.
Now Chad Kassem, the reissue house's proprietor, has come out with the 1957 sequel, Ella & Louis Again (same cast, but with Louis Bellson replacing Rich on drums, for the better). It's swoon time all over. (For…
Stereophile’s editorial assistant, Ariel Bitran, directed my attention to this USA Today article on an interesting turntable from U-Turn Audio, a company founded by three close friends—Ben Carter, Bob Hertig, and Peter Maltzan—all in their early 20s, who were tired of playing records on cheap USB turntables.
Their first model, the Orbit, forgoes modern-day conveniences like a USB output and built-in speakers, but concentrates on quality and longevity. Unlike the many inexpensive USB turntables prevalent today—models whose low-quality styli are potentially…