Analog Sources: Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo power supply, Linn Ittok tonearm, Spectral MC cartridge; Day-Sequerra 25th Anniversary FM Reference, McIntosh Laboratory MR-78, Sony XDR-F2HD FM/AM tuners.
Digital Sources: Bryston BCD-1 CD player & BDP-3 media player with IAD soundboard & BDA-3 DAC; Oppo Digital BPD-103 universal player; Lenovo P50 computer running Windows 10 Pro (64-bit), Bryston Windows USB driver, JRiver Media Center 22, Roon Core.
Preamplification: Bryston BP-26, Mark Levinson ML-7 preamplifiers; Sutherland…
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Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I measured the Constellation Inspiration Stereo 1.0 with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 As We See It"). Before performing any tests, I ran it at one-third its specified clipping power into 8 ohms for an hour. At the end of that time, both the top panel and the perforated side panels were warm, at 106.4°F (41.4°C); the gain at the speaker terminals was 25.1dB for both the balanced and single-ended inputs—slightly below the specified 26dB; and the output inverted absolute polarity with both inputs.
The Constellation amplifier's input…
I started my Sunday by visiting Plurison, the Canadian distributor for Focal, Naim, Rega, Musical Fidelity, Devialet, Music Hall, Wharfedale, Cambridge, Astell&Kern, and others (and, under the name Audio Plus Services, the US distributor for some of those same brands). As they did last year, Plurison set up shop in the Ville-Marie room—one of the Bonaventure's largest, having been carved out of what used to be the hotel's main restaurant—and presented their products in a mix of active and static displays, with a degree of visual refinement that few other exhibitors matched, and none…
Along with those other nerdy qualities I love about sound reproduction, I love a good soundstage. That's because a good soundstage, like a clever Hollywood movie effect, can provide the push needed to make me believe that someone who can't possibly be there in front of me singing or playing an instrument actually is and that I've missed nothing.
I bring up the soundstage thing not because I think hearing a good soundstage during playback is essential to one's enjoyment of a recording, but because the soundstage thing is the aspect of playback I was most wowed by of the system I heard in…
Quebec-based Solen—which distributes parts from a number of different manufacturers, as well as manufacturing their own well-regarded capacitors and other components—has a talent for filling their exhibit rooms with scores of items, including finished products made from the parts they sell. Among the latter at this year's Montreal show was a single-ended triode amp that will soon be available as the Coffin Audio 2A3 SE. Using new-old stock 6SL7 tubes to drive its nominal 2A3 directly heated output tubes, the nicely made Coffin amp uses Solen Teflon coupling caps, and the stereo amp's retail…
I would love Art Dudley even if I had never met him, listened to bluegrass with him, or swapped stories about aliens near a campfire under a milky-way-filled Cherry Valley sky. I would love him because he's Art D. and his audio writings are so I-am-there intimate and engrossing. Unfortunately, every time I read his stuff I want more. It is one thing to read audio porn but, for me, audio porn really needs sight and sound. In print form it is not fully satisfying. Forget MQA and DSD, I want POV. I want to see Art sitting on his new couch listening to Shindo-powered Altecs. Likewise, when I…
One format that is often an afterthought in discussions about downloads, LPs, and every other music storage and playback medium is the SACD. Fiercely beloved by a determined minority, most of them audiophiles, SACDs continue to be manufactured, most recently by Mark Piro's New York-based Analog Spark label. His latest hybrid SACD release is a reissue of Todd Rundgren's 1972 masterpiece, Something/Anything?.
A fascinating mix between a prodigious writer of inviting pop tunes and a musical mad scientist with a seemingly endless appetite for self-indulgence, Rundgren's career has bounced up…
On at least one occasion that I can recall—in 1996, in the early days of Listener magazine—a US publicist for the Japanese manufacturing company Denon told me that they planned to discontinue their DL-103 moving-coil phono cartridge, an enduringly popular model that had been in production since 1962 (footnote 1). At the time, neither the DL-103 nor any of their other cartridge models appeared on Denon's US price lists, and neither English-language promotional materials nor even a basic spec sheet was available to American consumers or press. (All of this is charbroiled into my memory because…
I re-auditioned the MusiKraft with the recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto by David Oistrakh and the French National Radio Orchestra, under the direction of André Cluytens (EMI Centenary SAX 2315). The cartridge's strengths, well known to me now, were all there: the timpani taps that open the piece were temporally taut yet endowed with a realistically resonant tone and generous die-away. Oistrakh's entrance came across with a degree of nuance that seemed unlikely to be artifice: he pulled back, almost imperceptibly, against the tempo set by Cluytens, seemingly to let the listener know…
I have long been aware of English audio company Prism Sound, both from my use at the turn of the century of their excellent PCI card–based DScope2 measurement system (footnote 1), and from some of my friends' enthusiasm for Prism's SADiE digital audio workstation. Prism Sound was founded in 1987 by two DSP engineers, Graham Boswell and Ian Dennis, who had first met when working at mixing-console manufacturer Rupert Neve, in Cambridge, England. From the beginning, Prism Sound operated exclusively in the world of professional audio, but a year or so ago I began seeing their first domestic…