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For exhibitors, showing off their products at audio shows is a crap shoot. The vagaries of arbitrarily assigned hotel rooms with unpredictable acoustics can play havoc with the sound of even the best-sounding systems. But over the years I've been attending shows, Joseph Audio's dems have always impressed me with how Jeff Joseph manages to set up his speakers so that they work with instead of against a hotel room's acoustics. Yes, Joseph's setup skills, going back to his days in audio retail, play an important role here. But his speakers, too, need to be of sufficiently high quality to benefit…
I began my listening with the MBL Corona C15 amplifiers, which I reviewed in June. These monoblocks had proved a synergistic match with Vivid Audio's Giya G3 speakers, which had preceded the new Josephs in my room, but the balance, though very clean and articulate, was definitely on the lean side. This was particularly so in the upper bass, though the low bass seemed boosted. I suspect that the Perspective was voiced with a softer-sounding amplifier than the C15. The foam liners were in the Perspectives' ports, but removing them wasn't the answer—the excessive low bass then got in the way…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Two-way, three-driver, floorstanding loudspeaker with vented enclosure. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) Sonatex-dome tweeter, two 5.5" (140mm) magnesium-cone woofers. Crossover frequency: 2kHz. Crossover: Asymmetrical Infinite Slope. Frequency response: 35Hz–20kHz, ±2dB (listening window). Sensitivity: not specified. Impedance: 8 ohms nominal, 6 ohms minimum. Power handling: not specified. Supplied accessories: cone feet and stabilizer bars.
Dimensions: 36" (915mm) H by 8.5" (216mm) W by 13" (330mm) D. Shipping weight: approximately 81 lbs (37.6kg) each…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog Sources: Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo power supply, Linn Ekos tonearm, Linn Arkiv B cartridge.
Digital Sources: Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP universal player; Apple 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini running OS10.7, iTunes 10, Pure Music 1.89, Audirvana Plus 1.5.10; NAD M50 media player with NAD M52 and NetGear RAID arrays; Logitech Transporter media server; NAD M51, Auralic Vega, Musical Fidelity V90-DAC D/A converters; Arcam rBlink Bluetooth DAC; dCS Vivaldi SACD/CD player–D/A system; Ayre Acoustics QA-9 USB A/D converter.
Preamplification: Channel D…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I used DRA Labs' MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Joseph Audio Perspective's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. All measurements were performed with the ports lined with the foam tubes, which is how I preferred the speaker in my auditioning.
My estimate of the Perspective's voltage sensitivity was 84dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is on the low side. However, as indicated by its plot of impedance magnitude and electrical phase against frequency (fig.1),…
Dood!! Stairway To Heaven!!!
Your first sip of beer beer. Your first drag on a cigarette. Maybe even that first kiss. Led Zeppelin was the soundtrack for the Seventies and now, you may want to file those cherished but worn LP copies and replace them with the much ballyhooed reissues from Rhino.
Recently, I received a promo set of the deluxe edition vinyl LPs for the first three Zep records, and I must say, they are fairly special. The rest of the catalog will follow. And yes, you guessed it, Zoso, or Led Zeppelin IV if you prefer, will be out just in time for Christmas. Yes,…
“You don't know what you'll do until you're put under pressure.
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester.”
Talk about your genius half–rhymes! Although he’s best known as the raspy voice and gritty songwriter behind “Across 110th Street,” the title track to a fairly forgettable blaxploitation film of the same name, whose fame was revived by Quentin Tarantino in his 1997 film Jackie Brown, Bobby Womack who died on Friday at the age of 70, will go down as one of the finest, if undervalued soul singers of his or any other generation. Womack who’d survived a number of health problems…
New York's CE Week occurs every June and is a miniature version of the January CES held in Las Vegas. The proportional representation of serious audio gear is similar but, given the small number of total exhibits, audio pickings are usually very thin. This year, however, there was more audio buzz than ever before.
First, there was a panel discussion "Making High Resolution Audio Accessible," which was an updated iteration a similar event held last January in which industry representatives discussed marketing strategies for high resolution audio. However, this time, it was preceded by an…
It's going to happen very soon.—Leonard Cohen, "The Great Event"
With a parts list that includes 18 new-old-stock Black Cat capacitors, 16 vintage-style Cosmos potentiometers, two Tango chokes, one Tango power transformer, and some of the loveliest steel casework I've seen on a contemporary product, no one could accuse Noriyuki Miyajima of skimping on the build quality of his company's only power amplifier, the Miyajima Laboratory Model 2010 ($9995, footnote 1). Then again, because the 2010 is an output-transformerless (OTL) tube amplifier, Miyajima-san spent considerably less on iron…
In an unusually good-sounding Russian recording of excerpts from Prokofiev's Cinderella (LP, Melodiya C 01381-2, with Gennadi Rozhdestvensky conducting the Moscow Radio Large Symphony Orchestra) every pizzicato was a burst of intensity, every note in the harps and double basses a deep, colorful thrum—and every melody an object of fascination. And in "Still There'll Be More," from Procol Harum's Home (LP, Regal Zonophone SLRZ 1014), Chris Copping's unusually resonant electric bass and the ever-inventive drumming of the late B.J. Wilson seemed locked together, temporally and dynamically, as…