Sidebar 3: Measurements
Before performing any measurements, I ran one Pass Labs XA60.8 (serial no. 28984) for an hour at one-third its specified maximum power of 60W into 8 ohms—thermally, the worst case for an amplifier with a class-B or -AB output stage. By the end of the hour, the top panel was warm, at 96.4°F (35.8°C), and the side-mounted heatsinks were a little hotter, at 109.1°F (42.8°C). (Temperatures were measured with a Mastercool infrared thermometer.) The XA60.8 ran a little cooler than the XA60.5 I reviewed in January 2014, probably due to its larger heatsinks.
I…
Here's our final report from the New York Audio Show. Thank you to everyone who watched our previous videos, all of which featured Herb Reichert (left above in JA's photo) and gave us feedback—positive and otherwise. We started making these videos as a response to feedback, and will continue monitoring feedback to help improve our future videos.
In the first room hosted by Adirondack Audio & Video: a D-08u SACD Player ($14,995), PD-171A belt-drive turntable ($6,995), Ortofon Cadenza Blue cartridge ($2039), EQ-500 vacuum-tube phono EQ ($6495), C-900u control preamplifier ($14,…
For 13 years now, Maria Schneider and her Jazz Orchestra have played Thanksgiving week at the Jazz Standard in New York City, and, judging from the late set on Tuesday, they just keep getting better and better.
I've been following Schneider closely since the mid-1990s, when she and the band played every Monday night at Visiones, a small, now-defunct club in Greenwich Village. The door fees gave her enough to pay each band member $25 and herself $15, the cost of cab fare to and from her apartment on the Upper West Side. Several years passed before bookers and producers came in for a listen…
Art Dudley returned to the nova300 in December 2017 (Vol.40 No.12):
Come back, baby. You'll find a million poems deep in your destitute soul.—Richard Hugo, "Second Chances"
The poet Richard Hugo (1923–1982) was known by his students for suggesting that every poem has two subjects: the thing that triggered the writing of the poem in the first place—the writer's Grecian Urn, if you will—and, beyond that, whatever eventually becomes the finished poem's actual subject. Hugo observed that the latter often isn't known to the writer when he or she begins work, but reveals itself over…
The music world continues to lose its very brightest talents. It was a very sad sidebar to the Thanksgiving holiday that on Wednesday, November 22, both the great jazz producer George Avakian passed away at 98 and power pop guitarist and songwriter Tommy Keene died way too early at 59 at his home in Los Angeles.
Not a household name by any means, Keene was a star in the world of indie rock. In a world populated by literally thousands of guitar players, Keene's sharp, extra crunchy guitar tone was distinct and unmistakable. His songwriting, indebted like all power poppers to The Beatles,…
Overflowing with heart, Brahms' three Trios for violin, cello, and piano are amongst the most venerated chamber works in the literature. Completed over a span of 35 years, they reveal Brahms forever true to his love and longing. Again and again it surfaces, expressed through an irrepressible love for melody, Hungarian and gypsy sentiments, romance and drama that sings and sighs at its most vulnerable in this special, two-disc Sony recording of the Brahms Piano Trios from cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and violinist Leonidas Kavakos.
Surprising as it may seem, this seems to be the…
Let's talk live recordings and audiophiles. While they may be semi-loathe to admit it, most genuinely possessed music fans, even including those with audiophile leanings, have live stuff or unreleased studio recordings that have been passed down to them via cassette tapes, MP3s, or CDs. After you buy everything that's been legally released and widely available, your curiosity naturally turns to finding what else is out there. And no matter what kind of music you like, there are a lot of killer bootlegs out there. On a trip several years ago to the Barcelona Jazz Festival, where the…
I spend my days comparing cartridges and speaker stands, arguing about imaging and microphone placement, speculating about DAC filters, and lately, sometimes, very secretly listening to headphones connected not to commercially available headphone amplifiers but directly to the outputs of basic tubed and solid-state power amplifiers. No person in his right mind would or should try this—it's too easy to destroy a pair of delicate, expensive headphones. But for me, it's been worth the risk.
My unauthorized experiments have been revelatory, and I have learned two things: 1) The sounds of…
And especially this 70-minute Bach CD. Using the Rogue RH-5 with Schiit Audio's Yggdrasil DAC, I played it all the way through, comparing its sound through the Susvaras to its sound through JPS Labs' Abyss AB-1266 Phis. The Susvaras were a smidgen more relaxed, which made these charming chorales sound slightly more artful and flowing. The music glowed with the Susvaras, but was better sorted and more corporeal through the Abysses. The Susvaras fully captured the atmosphere of the recording space, but the Abysses provided a more direct and intimate perspective that made Bach's counterpoint…
Back in May 2014, I reviewed NAD's Masters Series M50 Digital Music Player ($2499) and M52 Digital Music Vault ($1999 with 2TB storage). At the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, NAD announced the M50.2, which is almost identical to the original M50 but now incorporates two 2TB hard disks, arranged as a 2TB RAID array, to ensure data integrity, and adds TosLink and coaxial digital inputs, Bluetooth with aptX for streaming music from a smartphone or tablet, and two single-ended analog inputs—all for $3999, or $499 less than the combined cost of the two earlier products. Like the M50, the M50.2…
