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"When you're doing it, you're basically looking under the hood of the song," Ambel says. "It does really make you look at the essence of a song and what you wanna pick. Then you're working with the limitations of the instrument, to try to give it a little more of an arrangement. Some stuff lends it itself better to this than others. For instance, we haven't done any Bob Dylan. He rarely has a bridge in a song, and without the lyrics, it's hard. One of my favorite records of all time is the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack, but that has instrumentals on it. When it's one instrument…
Saturday December 9, from 12pm to 4pm, Suncoast Audio (7353 International Place, Unit 309, Sarasota, FL, 34240) says they are sending 2017 out with a bang! They are hosting a year-ending event with Vivid loudspeakers, Gryphon electronics, and Shunyata cabling.
Philip O'Hanlon from On A Higher Note will be demonstrating the new Series 2 Vivid G2 speakers and Gryphon electronics, including the Colosseum amplifier, Pandora preamplifier, Diablo 300 integrated amplifier, and Mojo S speakers. Grant Samuelsen from Shunyata will be on hand to discuss the importance of electrical grounding, as…
I've always been a fan of Christmas music because musicians of every stripe, and singers in particular, are magically drawn to the stuff. From Otis Redding belting out "White Christmas," to The Sonics banging on "Santa Claus," to the immortal Charles Brown crooning his "Please Come Home for Christmas," to Francis Albert Sinatra applying his pipes to any holiday number he took a liking to, Christmas music has teased out a lot of memorable performances. Could it be that singing about happiness, snowflakes and Rudolph is a refreshing change from love, loss and all the other usual subjects of…
Few violinists would consider saddling a recording with a title as grand and potentially pretentious as Grandissima Gravita. But not only is Rachel Podger's latest Channel Classics hybrid SACD with her ensemble, Brecon Baroque, grandly played—Podger is brilliant as always—but its title also serves as an apt descriptor of the emotional tenor of most of the works on the program.
The choice of contents is explained in one of the cleverest introductory essays I've ever encountered in a recording. Commentator Mark Seow stages a scene in heaven in which the album's four contributors—the 18th…
Yes, with the beginning of winter and the holiday season almost upon us, the January 2018 issue of Stereophile has started dropping into mailboxes, being displayed on newsstand shelves, and being downloaded to tablets. And it is, even if we say so ourselves, one heck of an issue, with GoldenEar's Triton Reference speaker on its cover and reviewed inside by John Atkinson. JA also kicks off the issue with a look at the controversy raised by MQA. Controversy? Also in the January Stereophile, Jim Austin examines the time-domain performance of MQA-equipped DACs and one Internet troll is already…
Tuesday, December 12, 2–7pm, New York retailer In Living Stereo (2 Great Jones Street, Manhattan, NY 10003) is holding a special headphone event featuring the entire line of Audeze headphones, Woo Audio tube headphone amplifiers and the Hugo TT, Mojo, and new Poly wireless streamer for the Mojo from Chord Electronics.
Jack Wu from Woo Audio, Evan Grimm from Audeze, and Richard Colburn from Chord Electronics will be there to talk technology and answer questions. There'll be snacks available as well as "great coffee" from In Living Stereo's Darkstar Coffee shop.
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."—Claude Shannon
Since its announcement at the end of 2014, Master Quality Authenticated, the MQA encoding/decoding system, has spawned outspoken criticism. Some of the more thoughtful negative reactions have come from engineers such as Dan Lavry, Bruno Putzeys, and Daniel Weiss. Others have been expressed by manufacturers of digital products: the late Charley Hansen at Ayre Acoustics, for example, along with Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat at…
I don't think I've ever seen an audio debate as nasty as the one over Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), the audio-encoding/decoding technology from industry veterans Bob Stuart, formerly of Meridian and now CEO of MQA Ltd., and Peter Craven. Stuart is the company's public face, and that face has been the target of many a mud pie thrown since the technology went public two years ago. Some of MQA's critics are courteous—a few are even well-informed—but the nastiness on-line is unprecedented, in my experience.
It's reasonable to be concerned about MQA. It's a big deal. There's already much…
Manufacturers' Comment
Editor: Thanks for the Follow-up and the chance to comment on Jim Austin's discussion of MQA's time-domain performance.
The graph in Jim's fig.4 shows the result of converting the MQA file directly to analog without a decoder. The text describes it as ". . . mostly linear-phase, though the asymmetry suggests some nonlinearity in the phase response. . ."
If we look at the 48kHz MQA test signal waveform (fig.1 in this comment), there is no pre-response. It is elegant that the decoder "unfolds" it back to a perfect impulse as we can infer from Jim's…
I first learned of the Kuzma Stogi at the 1993 Winter CES in Las Vegas. In VPI's room at the Sahara, a portly, black tonearm was sitting proudly atop the new VPI TNT Series 3 turntable. Pointing straight at me from the center of its massive, exceptionally stout frame was a tapered armtube the diameter of a swollen thumb. The fact that this unknown (to me) tonearm was chosen to sit atop a turntable as respected as the TNT told me I was looking at a serious new product. VPI's Harry Weisfeld was standing nearby, beaming as usual, to answer the barrage of questions that sprang from my lips as I…