I brought three records to our…
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Kyle studied Film and TV at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He had a freakish obsession with penguins and spent hours at a time glued to his Macbook watching downloads of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. I studied marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, counted down the days till the release of Guitar Hero I for Playstation Two, and once paid $20 for a broken drummer monkey known as Trick Star because I wanted to feel free and alive. In the summer of 2006, Kyle and I decided to start listening to vinyl. Why? Because vinyl was cool, and we were not.
“Hi, Ariel? This is Steve Cohen at In Living Stereo. I just opened up your turntable box. There are some sweatpants in here. Oh, and the tonearm cable is missing.”
“MISSING?”
“Yes.”
When I dropped off my turntable at In Living Stereo for repair, six months had passed since the late-night tonearm cable-splitting calamity. I had totally forgotten the extent of damage committed to my Rega P1. To my memory, only a pin had to be resoddered to the cable, as I had told Steve when I dropped it off.
“Lemme see what I can do with it,” Steve put me on hold for a week.
…
Tubes, tubes, tubes.
The amps (and preamps) keep coming.
McIntosh Laboratories is back in the act with a limited-edition revival of the MC275 tube amplifier, the original of which was produced from May 1961 through July 1973—one of the longest model runs in hi-fi history.
New companies devoted to tube gear keep cropping up—in recent years, America's VAC and Cary and Canada's Sonic Frontiers. The same thing appears to be going on in the UK. The pages of British magazines are filled with new tube gear.
I was talking with a few dealer friends. It's not the old farts—…
"It must have been this model," I offered, showing him my recently arrived McIntosh 275 Commemorative Edition, named in honor of Gordon Gow, the late president of McIntosh Laboratories.
"That's the one."
"Best amp you ever owned," I said. "Thirty years of hi-fi, Larsik, and I'm afraid it's all been downhill since your Mac 275."
Lars erupted with one of his strange Scandinavian snorts.
"I didn't know you spoke Danish, Lars," I continued innocently. "Well, here it is—a new Mac 275, with updated components and a few changes in circuitry. Balanced as well as single-…
Be warned. Dennis Had is right: These amps can seriously mess with your head, particularly the single-ended jobs. These amps sound so right and so different from other amps, tube or solid-state, that you have to scratch your head and wonder. You also have to ask yourself some very serious questions about whether the hi-fi industry, such as it was, took a very wrong turn—oh, let's say, some time around 1938.
Why do speaker manufacturers produce such insensitive speakers, requiring muscle amps that don't sound nearly as good as one of these tube amps with a 300B? Why can't more…
There's so much uncertainty and confusion surrounding computer audio and high-resolution downloads. Which hi-rez formats will win out? How do you store the downloads you've bought? (Easy. Don't buy them.) How do you access them? Will digital rights management (DRM) cramp your style, or data-storage fees for cloud computing crumple your wallet?
I don't care. I have never paid to download or stream anything, and I probably never will. My priority is to get the most from the several thousand CDs I already own. As cheaply as possible, without "adopting" anything, early or late. Yet I love…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Solid-state D/A converter with asynchronous USB and S/PDIF data inputs. Sample rates handled: 32–192kHz (S/PDIF), 32–96kHz (USB), both at up to 24 bits word length.
Dimensions: 3.75" (95mm) wide by 1.7" (40mm) high by 6.7" (170mm) deep
Serial number of review sample: Not noted (Tellig); SDY0367 (Atkinson & measurements).
Price: $379.
Manufacturer: Musical Fidelity Limited, 24-26 Fulton Road, Wembley, Middlesex, England HA9 0TF, UK. Tel: (44) (0)20-8900-2866. Fax: (44) (0)20-8900-2983. Web: www.musicalfidelity.com. US distributor:…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
To measure the V-DAC II (serial no. SDY0367), I used Stereophile's loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 "As We See It"; for some tests, I also used my vintage Audio Precision System One Dual Domain analyzer.
Unlike the original V-DAC's S/PDIF input, which was limited to 96kHz, the V-DAC II's input operates at sample rates from 32kHz up to a maximum of 192kHz. The Macintosh USB Prober utility identified the product as the "Musical Fidelity V-DAC 24/96," but no serial number. USB Prober…
Just a brief comment to note the passing on Saturday August 11 of Italian audio distributor Enzo Natali, pictured at the 2012 CES second from left above with UK distributor Ricardo Franassovici (left) and Enzo's two sons Luca and Marco (right and far right). (My thanks to Ricardo for allowing me to publish both this picture and the one below.)
I first met Enzo in the early 1980s. While he played an important role is establishing US high-end brands in Europe—his company, Audio Natali, founded in 1959, distributes Audio Research, Krell, Dan D'Agostino, Transparent, VTL, Ayre, Wilson,…
The guitarist John Abercrombie's latest, Within a Song (on ECM) is something of a high-wire act: delicate music of an uninsistent intensity, a quiet swing, that hangs together or collapses on the ensemble's sustenance of balance. The musicians here—Joe Lovano on tenor sax, Drew Gress on bass, Joey Baron on drums—are masters at this sort of thing (and many other things too), and so it's a riveting album. Even when they coast, swish, and twirl along the slightest thread, you're carried along (or I was anyway).
Abercrombie is of the Jim Hall school of jazz electric guitar: low-key, single-…