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After living with the SOTA Vanguard CD player for nearly six months, I figured I'd better trundle off to Gordon's listening room, where I could compare the SOTA mano a mano to the Sony CDP-X779ES CD player that JGH reviewed in Vol.16 No.6 (p.154). It was, as are most of my evenings with Gordon, very educational.

First we listened to a brand-new CD I had just received from BBC Music Magazine: Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, performed by the BBC Symphony directed by Andrew Davis, and recorded live in Tokyo's Hitomi Kinen…

Other equipment used for this review included a Revox A-77 15ips 2-track tape recorder, a Sony PCM-F1, a Threshold FET-10 line controller, Boulder 500AE amplifiers, a Heath Company pink-noise generator, and part of the Snell/Lexicon/Rane home THX system reviewed last December. If this sounds like an odd lineup, here's my rationale: The Revox and the F-1 were used to play some of my original tapes which had ended up on Stereophile's first Test CD, and a tape of JA's that was transferred to Test CD 2. The FET-10 and 500AE are my current reference line controller…

The Sony CDP-X779ES had an output of 2.49V (L) and 2.52V (R), unbalanced when decoding a 1kHz, 0dB (full-scale) sinewave. The corresponding balanced outputs were 2.1V (L and R). Its output impedance, being well below 1 ohm, was actually too low to measure on our Audio Precision test set in either the balanced or unbalanced (fixed or variable) modes. The Sony's DC offset was 0.1mV left and 0.2mV right. The '779 was non-inverting from the unbalanced outputs, with a positive-going impulse test signal reproduced as positive at its outputs. I verified that the balanced…

Description: One-piece CD player. Front-panel controls: Digital Output select, track step, forward/reverse shuttle, Drawer open/close, Play, Pause, Stop, Line Out/Phone Level, Play Mode, Display Mode, AC Power. Remote controls: All the above, plus Peak Search, File Recall, Continue, Shuffle, Program, Custom Index, number buttons (0 to 20), program Clear, custom File, Erase file, Fader, Slow/fast search, Index search, A–B Repeat, Time, over-20 numeric, Check. Outputs: fixed and variable single-ended line and fixed balanced line, 2V at 50k ohms, headphones up to…

While I'd still rather have an original copy, these reissues for the most part deliver high-quality sound and deluxe packaging. Especially prized by deejays, funk and…

And there are more equipment reports to be found in this 188-page issue: Mikey Fremer reviews a massive monoblock from Greek company Ypsilon; Larry Greenhill reviews an almost-as-massive stereo amplifier…

Not a new recording, and one that has already received raves in all the other audiophile publications, but if Stereophile is the only such magazine you read, you'd just better know about it, for this is the definitive symphonic recording to date.

Buy it, listen to it, and get a good idea of what the other record companies have been doing to the sound of live music. The…

From the point of view of MQA Ltd., what might success look like?

"Success" would be achieved when MQA is used to master most, if not all, new releases and back…