Dear Reader,
Not long ago, I lost patience with coffee.
Before that, I'd never quite made it to coffee-nerd status, but I had all four wheels on the onramp. A few years ago I got rid of my cheap coffeemaker and switched to a French press, because it was more hands-on. I started buying whole beans instead of ground coffee, and grinding them in the store's grinder, on its coarsest setting. When that wouldn't do, I bought an inexpensive electric coffee grinder. When that wouldn't do, I bought a manual grinder. There was only one brand of bean I liked, and I had to drive 45 minutes…
Highlights of the considerably more expensive Goofus system were some of the hottest and newest products of the day, including a SOTA Star Sapphire turntable with Sumiko Premier MMT tonearm and Talisman Sapphire cartridge, a Spectral DMC-5 preamp, a BEL 1001 power amp, and a pair of Thiel speakers whose model designation I can't recall. Any or all of those might have been great when used with other products—I foolishly assumed that they'd all work well together—but after months of straining to convince myself that the system as a whole was great, I realized that Goofus was a screechy mess…
While it may elicit shakes of the head, nasty, distasteful looks, or vociferous yawps about its being nothing more than a load of warmed-over psychedelic pandering, the time may have come to listen again to Their Satanic Majesties Request, the much-maligned 1967 album by the Rolling Stones—and perhaps think of it in a slightly more humane light. Few records from that or any other era have been as widely savaged. It's easy to make the argument that any record with such a pretentious title deserves to be ridiculed. The music itself is scattered and feels unfinished in spots. Then there's that…
Landi said she wasn't being vague about the tapes for any reason other than that she and ABKCO (like every other label on earth) have been taken to task in online forums about sound issues. And just about everything else, for that matter. It's a subject near and dear to audiophiles, or at least those who participate in the Internet scrums over gear, music, you name it. I tried to counsel her that savoring unkind forum posts is a sort of art form in its own right. She smiled.
"I get a headache when I look at the forums. There's some guy on one of the forums yelling about the opening of '…
America's premiere DIY gathering, the almost-annual Burning Amp, promises to burn brighter in 2017. Scheduled for Sunday, November 12 at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center, the event has become so popular that hours have been extended and the show now runs from 8:30am to 8:00pm.
While the opportunity for DIYers to hear each other's creations, gain fresh insights, and form new friendships has always been one of Burning Amp's main attractions since it began in 2007, the event's speaker presentations and raffle items/giveways have also been major draws. To up the ante on the speaker front, as…
The agreement was simple. I would confine my record shopping to a single afternoon. No last minute runs to out-of-the-way shops the next day. No desperate pleas about "Just one more," or "I'll be quick, I promise." On the vacation with my wife that we'd been planning for an entire year, and one that almost immediately became a quasi-business trip, I had one Sunday afternoon to satiate my desire—the word "addict" has occasionally been thrown my way in anger—to check out vinyl LP stores in San Francisco. Given my limited time, I decided to ask SF friends for suggestions and to stay away from…
Following this year's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I trekked northwest to Port Townsend, Washington to observe Stereophile's one-and-only Jason Victor Serinus in his natural habitat.
In this Reviewer Video Profile, Jason gives us a tour of his listening room, introduces us to his adorable dogs, and shares some thoughts on life. Oh—and, of course, this video would not be complete without a little whistling! (But I won't tell you where.)
Despite having spent a good bit of time with Jason in person at audio shows, I was surprised to learn that he really is just as quick, witty, and…
He sold 65 million records. Today 10,000 in sales is considered amazing. He had 23 gold records. Many musicians today can only dream of that honor. Most of all, he was the one cat, after Louis Armstrong, from notoriously provincial New Orleans, who left town, toured the world and made it big.
Antoine Dominique Domino Jr., a lifelong native of New Orleans famed Ninth Ward has passed and the music world's connection to early rock 'n' roll has dwindled to the man who always said he'd outlive everyone else: Jerry Lee Lewis.
Fats, who acquired the nickname in the mid-1940s, was a self-…
Every day in my bunker, I use one of a few high-quality headphone amplifiers to double as a line-level preamplifier-controller and operate as the quality-assurance reference for my ongoing audio experiments. I must choose this component carefully, because it determines the upper limit of my system's ability to reveal any subtle differences among components under review.
A mediocre line stage will bring my system down: it will harden, cloud, or dull the music, making it sound canned. A superior line stage will raise my system up, allowing recordings to display their raw textures, natural…
With Sony MDR-Z1Rs: Although relatively sensitive (100dB/mW), Sony's MDR-Z1R headphones ($2299) thrived on the RH-5's gain and power: 16dB maximum, and 1.75W into 60 ohms. The Rogue brought out a taut athleticism that made the Sonys seem more fleshed out and three-dimensional than through either the Linear Tube Audio MZ2 ($1235) or Sony's own headphone amp, the TA-ZH1ES ($2199). It made the Sonys dance and play with a powerful, focused character.
With the Pass HPA-1, the Sony MDR-Z1Rs sounded smooth and precise—perhaps to a fault. In contrast, the Rogue brought to my experience of the '…
