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Brooklyn Rider: Lucid Flight Brooklyn Rider on Record

Sidebar: Brooklyn Rider on Record

The Brooklyn Rider Almanac
Mercury Classics B0021593-02 (CD). 2014. Nicholas Cords, Johnny Gandelsman, exec. prods.; Jesse Lewis, prod., eng.; Jesse Brayman, eng.; Kevin Germain, Tyler Hammann, Max Ross, asst. engs. DDD? TT: 78:33
Performance *****
Sonics ****½

Spontaneous Symbols
In the Circle ICR008 (CD). 2017. Nicholas Cords, Johnny Gandelsman, prods.; Ryan Streber, eng.; Hansdale Hsu, asst. eng. DAD? TT: 75:36
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½

In this, their 12th year of existence, it's probably more accurate to…

Alta Audio Hestia Titanium loudspeaker

Phrases like high fidelity and perfectionist audio suggest a central norm to which all things audio should aspire. Not a bad idea, in some ways, but if you look at the wide variety of loudspeakers out there that people love, from the old-school Auditorium 23s to the high-tech KEFs and Vivids, it can be hard to figure out what they all have in common.

While I like the idea of objective standards, I also like that high-end audio has room for a variety of approaches—specific aural embodiments of excellence—each striking its own balance between personal (sometimes idiosyncratic) vision and…

Alta Audio Hestia Titanium loudspeaker Page 2

In the end, I moved my chair back a couple of feet—the Hestias sounded best from a distance of 10' or more. In my room, this was a compromise: one or more of those ca-65Hz room modes was made more severe but the overall balance was better. Measurements taken with my handy Bosch laser measurer told me that with my chair in this position and the speakers tilted forward as far as they would go, the difference in the distances from my ears to the top and bottom midrange drivers was only about 1½". That's just a few degrees of phase in the middle of the midrange, so there shouldn't be much…

Alta Audio Hestia Titanium loudspeaker Specifications

Sidebar 1: Specifications

Description: Three-way, floorstanding, biwirable loudspeaker with open-baffle midrange and ported, "transmission line," bass alignment. Drive-units: modified RAAL ribbon tweeter, 6" (152mm) Morel upper-midrange unit with carbon-fiber/Rohacell composite cone and titanium former, two 7" (178mm) Dayton Audio Esoteric Series lower-midrange units with woven glass-fiber cone and titanium former, 10" (254mm) woofer with paper cone & titanium former. Frequency range: 28Hz–47kHz. Sensitivity: 90dB/2.83V/m. Impedance: 4 ohms. Recommended amplification: 50–400W.
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Alta Audio Hestia Titanium loudspeaker Associated Equipment

Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment

Analog Sources: Thorens TD 124 turntable (reconditioned by Schopper AG); Ortofon RMG-212 (rebuilt), Thomas Schick 12" tonearms; Ortofon 90th Anniversary SPU cartridge.
Digital Sources: MacBook Pro computer (early 2015); Intel NUC computer with SSD drive running Roon Optimized Core Kit; Benchmark Media Systems DAC 3, Meridian Explorer2 USB, Mytek HiFi Brooklyn, PS Audio DirectStream DACs.
Preamplification: Auditorium 23 Standard step-up transformer, EAR 834P phono stage, PS Audio BHK Signature preamplifier.
Power Amplifiers: Benchmark Media…

Alta Audio Hestia Titanium loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 3: Measurements

I used DRA Labs' MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Alta Hestia Titanium's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield responses. (I measured S/N HST02706.) The Alta's voltage sensitivity is specified as a higher-than-average 90dB/2.83V/m; my estimate was much lower, at 82.5dB(B)/2.83V/m. In part, this will be due to the fact that my figure is based only on the speaker's frontal radiation, whereas the Hestia Titanium, being a dipole design in the midrange, will also be putting out almost as much…

The Crawfish Whisperer

A few years ago, Chad Kassem, John Atkinson, and I attended a Pink Floyd conference in Princeton, New Jersey, where among other things we listened to Roger Waters' Amused to Death in surround at ungodly, ear-splitting levels.

Rather than permanently damage his hearing, and being a wise man and an incurable vinylhead, Kassem, head of Analogue Productions, made a beeline for the Princeton Record Exchange. He returned with a big bag of LPs he'd just scored at that hallowed Jersey vinyl palace. Amongst his treasures was Swampland Jewels, a compilation of Zydeco, Cajun and swamp pop numbers…

MQA Tested Part 2: Into the Fold

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.—Marcus Aurelius

Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), the audio codec from industry veterans Bob Stuart and Peter Craven, rests on two pillars: improved time-domain behavior, which is said to improve sound quality and what MQA Ltd. calls "audio origami," which yields reduced file size (for downloads) and data rate (for streaming). Last month I took a first peek at those time-domain issues, examining the impulse response of MQA's "upsampling renderer," the output side of this analog-to-analog system (footnote 1). This month I…

MQA Tested Part 2: Into the Fold Manufacturer's Comment

Manufacturer's Comment

Editor: Jim Austin's assessment of the lossy/lossless question is astute. After developing lossless compression (footnote 1), we realized that losslessness in the digital transmission path was not addressing some critical issues. Jim raises the question "lossless compared to what," and this is a key point. Data can be transferred bit-for-bit to a D/A converter, but there is no such thing as a lossless converter to or from analog; and, in reality, internal signals in practical converters are rarely bit-repeatable. So, MQA is stepping beyond the lossless pipe to…

More on MQA

An economy of information transmitted . . . what was encoded was only what was needed, nothing more. (footnote 1)

As I wrote in the January issue's "As We See It," Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), the encoding/decoding system developed by J. Robert (Bob) Stuart and Peter Craven, has been widely criticized, despite reports in this magazine and others that MQA-encoded files tend to sound better than the PCM originals from which they were derived. Also in last month's issue, Jim Austin investigated the time-domain performance of the MQA reconstruction filter and I examined some of the…