At the end of a long day of standing in halls and sneaking into converted bedrooms with little rows of chairs I find myself wondering—are there any other trade shows or hobby fairs that take place in the sleeping-rooms part of hotels? Certainly there are no others where so many are hoping so much—for a seat in the middle! This was a very intense Saturday at the Capital AudioFest. Today, the middle seats were all filled and…
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Hold an audio show in a hotel? VPI's Mat Weisfeld was snapped taking full advantage of the amenities and listening to music courtesy of VPI's new Nomad record player!
Room 708–710: Most of the exhibitors at CAF are not big brandnames with factories employing more than 100 persons. Most are highly inspired and maximally driven "ma & pa" operations like Klaus Bunge's Odyssey Audio. What is unique about Klaus is that he appears to begin designing with a very clear idea of what he wants (precision, dynamics, and laser-clear soundstages). Starting with a cost-is-no-object design, Mr. Bunge distills it over and over making it simpler and less costly each step of the way. When he finishes, he ends up with a roughly $1000amp/preamp combination and a $2200…
Room 615: I always learn something when I chat with Gary Dews and I always enjoy listening to music in the Border Patrol room. I met Gary in Hove, England back in 1994. Even then he was a fully formed individualist and working on some very sophisticated projects. He was then and remains committed to some of my favorite amp-design strategies: transformer coupling, tube rectification and choke-filtered power supplies.
The sound Gary was getting from the Border Patrol P21 push-pull 20W 300B amp ($12,750) driving the Living Voice Avatar loudspeakers ($11,850/pair) with Gary's own non…
Room 515: Every picture tells a story don't it? Well, not really. Like I mentioned earlier Capital Audiofest has been wrongly pegged by some as a "DIY gathering," not a big-time mainstream audio show. This is my first CAF but I have attended most of the audio shows in Europe and America and I did not see it like that. Clearly, this is not a show for Dave & Dan and the people at Sony probably never heard of CAF. What I saw and heard was something very unique and necessary—a show where a group of small manufacturers could pool their resources, make good sound, and maybe get connected to a…
Has it really been 30 years since an engineer named William H. Firebaugh unleashed on the audio world his radical and decidedly affordable Well Tempered Arm? (footnote 1) Indeed it has—and today, at 82, Bill Firebaugh seems busier than ever, with so many irons in the fire that he's been forced to give up the noble game of golf—an irony, as you'll see in a moment.
Firebaugh started down this road in the 1970s, while working at Ford Aerospace. "That was the time when FFT analyzers were appearing on the scene," he says. "We used a lot of Brüel & Kjaer gear in our work, so we received…
The penultimate distinction is Firebaugh's latest choice in drive belts: He has switched from a flat neoprene belt—which usually was installed with an intentional twist—to a polyester filament only 0.004" in diameter. (Human hairs range in diameter from 0.0003" to 0.007".) A thread of any sort must be knotted in order to make a belt. So it goes; Firebaugh says that the grooves in his motor pulley—one each for 33 1/3 and 45rpm—have been sized and shaped to account for that.
The final distinction: In recent years, Well Tempered Lab, which is now based in New Zealand, moved all of its…
The CD-200 is the new CD-only player from TASCAM, the professional-audio division of TEAC (footnote 1). It has unbalanced analog outputs, and RCA and optical digital outputs. The CD-200 also has a new transport, the CD-5020A, designed by TEAC for audio use.
Unlike many affordable disc-spinning devices with slot-loading transports (eg, inexpensive DVD players starting at $29.99), the CD-200 has a traditional drawer mechanism that has been upgraded to minimize the noise of loading and clamping a disc. TASCAM also claims improvements in the internal clock function, for smoother sound and…
Both Mahler and Anton Bruckner were Austrian. Both wrote symphonies that, to say the least, were not exemplars of Classical concision. However, to me, Bruckner's symphonies are one of the last outposts of Classical form, whereas for Mahler, formal structure had to give way to make room for Klezmer music, protracted intimations of eternity (or infinity), bundles of sticks, the kitchen sink, and the potato ricer.
I have always preferred the symphonies of Mahler to those of Bruckner. In my more dismissive moments, I have tended to regard Bruckner's more-popular symphonies as "…
Once, on a cold, dank, soundless day deep in the Eastern bloc, I watched a man spend over a million dollars on an audio system: a turntable, a fancy horn tweeter, a few wires, and some amplification for his modified Klipschorns. I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was a notary public.
Everyone there smirked and watched as he excitedly put the tonearm down on the first record, AC/DC's Back in Black. He laughed, he danced, he didn't sit down. He just skipped around the room, grinning and bouncing like a caffeinated child.
I thought, Does this man really need…
Whenever my system is suddenly producing copious amounts of tight bass, I feel a need to gorge myself on it until I can't stand it anymore. So I reached for Daft Punk's Homework (CD, Virgin) and played it through twice. Still bingeing, I played Sunn O)))'s Black One (CD, Southern Lord SUNN50) all the way through. Then I tried the bass orgy of Aphex Twin's I Care Because You Do (CD, Sire 61790-2). King Sunny Ade and His African Beats' Juju Music (LP, Island MLPS 9712) immersed me knee-deep in waves of pulsing bass guitar. The Sphinx supported the party mood, the low power of the talking drums…