Few rock bands have ever inspired such a sharp cleavage in fan opinion. And both sides are extremely passionate about their beliefs. One side despised the band's precision. For them they were a soulless mob of overprivileged SoCal studio cats (although Fagen was clearly a New Yawker)…
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The world has lost another irreplaceable musical legend in Steely Dan guitarist, bass player, songwriter, and co-frontman Walter Becker. I spent Sunday listening to Dan records, and trying to write about Becker's legacy. The guy was elusive, hard to read and reticent to the point of obsession (footnote 1).
The Genesis 500 ($650) is the baby brother of Monster Cable's top-of-the-line Genesis 1000 cartridge. It is almost identical in physical appearance, differing only in its use of green body trim (the 1000 sports red pinstripes). All of the functional differences appear to be in the stylus and cantilever. The cantilever of the 500 is a hollow sapphire rod tightly attached to an inner aluminum tube (the 1000 has a diamond-coated boron tube cantilever). Its stylus is a 6µm x 35µm line-contact (3µm x 60µm for the 1000). Monster claims a stylus life in excess of 600 hours for the Genesis 500, more…
Sidebar 1: Associated Equipment
This included the Well-Tempered Arm, VPI HW-19 turntable (this time sans the mat I have used in previous tests), Klyne SK-5a preamp, PS Audio 200cx power amp, and B&W 801F Matrix loudspeakers on 11" Sound Anchor stands. (The production version of these stands is about 4" shorter.) Interconnects were Monster M-1000, speaker wire Monster M-1 (mono-wired).
The Well-Tempered Arm was chosen for these reviews because it is known to be well suited to a wide variety of pickups. All of the moving-coil pickups here are moderately low in compliance. Such…
Bill Berry and His Ellington All-Stars: For Duke
Works by Duke Ellington
Bill Berry, cornet; Ray Brown, bass; Frankie Capp, drums; Scott Hamilton, tenor sax; Nat Pierce, piano; Marshal Royal, alto sax; Britt Woodman, trombone.
M&K Real-Time RT-101 (direct-to-disc LP).
Works by Duke Ellington
Bill Berry, cornet; Ray Brown, bass; Frankie Capp, drums; Scott Hamilton, tenor sax; Nat Pierce, piano; Marshal Royal, alto sax; Britt Woodman, trombone.
M&K Real-Time RT-101 (direct-to-disc LP).
This is to-date the best direct-to-disc recording I have heard. For once I can't complain about the high end being shrill or hard. The balances are excellent and the performances superior, with each member of the group getting his chance to show off. Marshal Royal's saxophone solos must be heard to be…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
Measurements were made with the spot frequency bands on the new CBS STR-330 test disc, backed up by the older CBS STR-100. The latter generally showed a greater high-end rise than the former in the frequency-response readings, and the results presented in the reviews are those given by the more recent recording. Test-record results provide useful information, but they are not an absolute. Test records from different sources invariably give slightly different results. STR-100 was used to assess crosstalk, and trackability was measured at 300Hz using the Audio…
Sidebar 3: Specifications
Description: Moving-coil phono cartridge with 6µm x 35µm line-contact stylus. Recommended tracking force: 1.8 grams.
Price: $650 (1989); no longer available (2017).
Manufacturer: Monster Inc. 601 Gateway Blvd. Suite 900, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA, Tel: (415) 840-2000. Web: www.monsterproducts.com.
Last May, Jack Oclee-Brown, KEF's Head of Acoustics, visited John Atkinson's listening room to drop off and set up the KEF Reference 5 loudspeakers ($19,000/pair). (JA's review appears in the October Stereophile, which will hit newsstands and mailboxes later this week.) In this video, they discuss Jack's origins and the challenges of speaker design, as well as the genesis of the Reference 5, KEF's Uni-Q drive-unit, and why, to perform quasi-anechoic speaker measurements, it's best to use a chamber as large as a true anechoic chamber.
If you are a fan of feline audiophiles, speaker design…
What was to have been the first Southern California-based T.H.E. Show organized without input from its late co-founder, Richard Beers, who died in 2016, has been postponed until 2018. The inaugural T.H.E. Show Anaheim, as the former T.H.E. Show Newport Beach is now called, was to have taken place September 22–24 at the Hilton Anaheim.
The reasons for the late postponement are spelled out in a two-page letter to exhibitors, which was released on September 6 by Beers' close friend and long-time associate, Show President Maurice R. Jung. In the letter, which was shared with Stereophile by…
One never knows, do one? Within the past year, I've had six preamplifiers in my system for critical evaluation, reviewing four of them and using another two as references. I was getting pretty tired of listening for sonic differences among preamps, and I told JA that I'd prefer my next reviewing assignment to be something different, like a speaker or a power amp. He agreed, but said he'd first like me to review just one more preamp, the Perfectionist Audio CPR/TIPS, which had been waiting patiently in the review queue in Santa Fe. Well, one more wouldn't hurt. Sounded kind of interesting,…
LPs. Oh, dear. I've just received the latest issue of the Schwann Opus, and I see that it no longer lists LPs (footnote 3). When I requested PAC to send me a review sample of the phono-staged CPR, I was told that they'd have to build me one: there's so little demand for it that all they keep in stock is the line-stage–only model!
As it turned out, the performance of the phono stage was a bit of a disappointment after the excellence of the line stage. The first problem was minor and idiosyncratic: in the "Recharge" position, there was a loud hum that defied all my efforts to get rid of it…