The context for the discussion was Herb Reichert's review of the KEF Q350 bookshelf speaker ($649.99/pair), which is…
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Back in the early summer of 2017, Jack Oclee-Brown, KEF's Head of Acoustics, visited John Atkinson to set up the KEF Reference 5 loudspeakers in his listening room. JA's review of the Ref 5 was published in October 2017, and during Jack's visit JA talked to him about the design of that speaker. But they also discussed KEF's affordable "Q" line of speakers and the challenges a manufacturer faces in bringing an inexpensive loudspeaker to market, the subject of this interview.
Did you know that in May 1913, even before Diaghilev's ballet of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring caused fist-fights among Parisian concertgoers, Stravinsky and Debussy together played the newly printed four-hand reduction of the score? You can feel a hefty helping of the excitement created by the crashing keyboards of two geniuses in the percussive thrill that Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes bring to the score on this new Hyperion recording of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Concerto for Two Pianos, and three other short works for two piano and four hands.
I've always stayed away…
John Atkinson wrote about the TAD ME One in March 2018 (Vol.41 No.3):
Visiting Herb Reichert's Bed-Stuy bunker to pick up the KEF Q350 loudspeakers, which he reviews elsewhere in this issue, I let slip that I was thinking of giving a listen to the pair of TAD Micro Evolution One speakers reviewed by Thomas J. Norton in the February issue (footnote 1).
"You should—you're going to like what you hear," promised Herb, who'd been listening to a pair of the stand-mounted, three-way TADs at Steve Guttenberg's. Tom Norton had also liked what he'd heard: "In my months of living with the…
Herb Reichert reviewed the Adagio in March 2018 (Vol.41 No.3):
When I read Art Dudley's "Listening" column in the June 2016 issue, I was astonished by how much he praised Tavish Design's Adagio phono preamplifier ($1790) relative to his Auditorium 23 Hommage T2 moving-coil step-up transformer ($5000), the Shindo Laboratory Aurièges outboard phono preamp ($7895), and the phono section in his Shindo Masseto preamp (discontinued, since replaced by the Shindo Monbrison: $12,500). Art made it sound as if the Tavish Adagio could deliver a significant portion of the thrust, scale, momentum,…
Willie Nelson: Stardust
Columbia/Analogue Productions AAPP 116-45 (2 45rpm LPs). 1978/2017. Booker T. Jones, prod.; Donivan Cowart, Bradley Hartman, engs.; Bernie Grundman, mastering. AAA. TT: 43:28
Performance *****
Sonics *****
Columbia/Analogue Productions AAPP 116-45 (2 45rpm LPs). 1978/2017. Booker T. Jones, prod.; Donivan Cowart, Bradley Hartman, engs.; Bernie Grundman, mastering. AAA. TT: 43:28
Performance *****
Sonics *****
In Nashville in the early 1960s, Willie Nelson hit his low point. He'd failed at singing and writing country music, and one snowy night, after a liberal drowning of his troubles at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, he decided to totter outside and lie down in the middle of Lower Broadway. In subsequent retellings of the tale, he's always maintained that he…
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.—Yogi Berra
Over one busy week in 1986, Karlheinz Brandenburg laid the foundation of a technology that a few years later would upend the record business. Brandenburg, a PhD student in electrical engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, was figuring out how to code digital music efficiently enough that it could be delivered over digital telephone lines. A patent examiner had concluded that what the application proposed was impossible, so over a week of late nights, Brandenburg produced the proof of concept and more.…
Traditional audiophiles share much with their computer-based brethren, not least a love of music and of high sound quality. But they also differ from each other in important ways. Computer people are more comfortable than the rest of us with information technology—indeed, they enjoy manipulating data, including the data employed to make music. Some spend many hours managing often vast, if sometimes ill-gotten music libraries, using open-source, open-standard programs—even programs they wrote themselves. They likely have set up sophisticated digital-signal processing systems to perfect the…
There's good news for owners of Thiel loudspeakers manufactured between 1977 and 2012. Coherent Source Service of Lexington, Kentucky, will provide Thiel warranty and non-warranty service for customers worldwide. The company has been founded by Rob Gillum, who worked with Thiel for over 30 years and eventually became Director of Manufacturing.
Drawing from a stockpile of parts for legacy Thiel models—nearly all relevant parts are said to be available—Gillum will utilize his training in what has been described as "every aspect of service and manufacturing including driver build, crossover…
The 2018 audio show season is about to start and it's not just Stereophile's coverage of high-end audio shows—which has taken a leap forward with the inclusion of Jana Dagdagan's binaural videos—that's changing. The shows themselves are on the move.
Take the free Montréal Audio Fest (March 23–25, Hotel Bonaventure Montréal, Quebec). Exhibitors are invited to present systems for under $5000 in addition to their preferred systems, and, in an attempt to attract visitors aged 18–35, are encouraged to play music from video-game soundtracks. In addition, musicians will perform live some of the…
Audiophiles are oblivious to the low-end music-reproduction medium that's currently staging a comeback: the cassette tape (footnote 1). I've adopted the cassette craze in my own small way. I glory in the trusted mixtape, which I play in the stereo cassette deck of my 1990s Toyota. An automobile is a dearly cherished possession in New York City; when I cruise the outer boroughs on Sunday, I want tunes galore. So I retrieved my 1996 Aiwa cassette deck, and, attic-bound as it had been for 20 years, it was in need of repair. Via Yelp, I came across Hi-Tech Electronics, a small repair-everything-…