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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…
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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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
MBL's mighty N31 CD player-DAC is featured on the new issue's cover and gets an in-depth review from John Atkinson inside, but February is also our annual "Records 2 Die 4" feature: Our team of writers put their heads together and came up with 61 albums that they will take with them when they go. February also features more on the controversial MQA coding scheme, from John Atkinson on p.3 and Jim Austin on p.125.
In equipment reports we review amplifiers from Jadis, Pass Labs, and PS Audio; LP players from MoFi and Rega; AVM's Ovation MP 8.2 CD player-DAC, and TAD's amazing little Micro…
In May of 2016, Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) was sold to EVA Automation in a deal that included Classé Audio and the US distribution of Rotel Electronics. Since then, production and distribution of B&W and Rotel products has continued but not so for Classé. Initially, the new management announced that production and distribution of current products would continue but that all newly announced products, prototypes of which had been shown at the previous CEDIA, would be put on hold. However, in July of 2016, Classé operations in Montreal were shut down and all employees, including…