I measured the CanEver ZeroUno with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 "As We See It"), using both the Audio Precision's optical and electrical digital outputs and USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro running on battery power with Pure Music 3.0 playing WAV and AIFF test-tone files. Apple's USB Prober utility identified the CanEver as "xCORE USB Audio 2.0" from "XMOS," and confirmed that its USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. Apple's AudioMIDI utility revealed that, via USB, the ZeroUno accepted 24-bit integer data…
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GamuT's designer and CEO, Benno Baun Meldgaard, was on hand in the first room I entered on Floor 4 to introduce the new optional R2R tape playback board ($1990) for the GamuT D3i dual-mono preamp ($8490). Whether the presence of a number of new and old tape decks at AXPONA—the one in this room was a rebuilt Studer—signals a rekindled interest in tape amongst anyone other than confirmed audiophiles is unclear. But what was clear is that the piano on Ben Webster's Gentle Ben sounded beautiful and mellow. The horn, in turn, was appropriately bright, and the presentation distinguished by a nice…
Doing my best to leave the rest of the poetry to the music, my second-day new-product coverage began with a visit to the Playback Designs room, manned by the company's president and designer, DSD champion Andreas Koch. There, I found two new Playback Designs products, the MPD-8 DAC ($22,000) and MPT-8 Digital Music Transport (target price $14,000-$20,000). Both are due out at year's end. While Andreas assured me that what I would hear would be the final sound of both products, I know there will be some software fixes to the transport, because it declared that my 11-track La Perla Baroqua SACD…
While ubiquity is not necessarily synonymous with high quality, the fact that Aurender's music servers/streamers appeared in at least 12 exhibit rooms at AXPONA 2017 certainly indicates that they're doing something right. In fact, in the third-floor room in which Aurender partnered with GamuT and Grand Prix Audio, their A10 caching music server and player with analog outputs ($5500) was the crucial source of excellent sound.
Aurender's sole all-in-one lifestyle product—their only server that includes a DAC—the A10 was just updated in February to offer MQA playback. Heard in a room that…
If you want to know why Stereophile's John Atkinson, Jana Dagdagan, and Herb Reichert journeyed to Philadelphia earlier this year to conduct two video interviews with Doug White of The Voice That Is, you only had to hear his set-up at AXPONA to understand that their trip was in pursuit of excellence. If what they heard in Philly was anything like the sound Doug managed to produce in a modest-sized hotel room, they must have left elated.
Once you see the system list—Tidal Audio Akira speaker ($215,000), Presencio Reference preamplifier ($77,900), Impulse monoblock amplifiers ($64,900/pair…
I love tubes and horns. So naturally, when Jason and I were dividing up rooms, I leapt at the opportunity to cover Destination Audio, a company rumored to execute tubes and horns well, even in small hotel rooms.
As owner Sam Wisniewski explained to me, the name Destination Audio refers to the point of sound he had always been searching for. After many years of experimenting, he finally created Destination Audio's eponymous three-way, fully horn-loaded speakers ($95,000/pair). And, as implied by his company's name, these are the only speakers he will ever create and sell, because he's…
Never have I had to work so hard to convince someone that a product that first surfaced at CES 2017, just started shipping, and was just awarded MQA certification belonged in a new-product show report. Finally, after several minutes of what was beginning to look like a Socratic dialogue, Michael McCormick, President of Minneapolis-based Bel Canto Design, acknowledged that the single-box Bel Canto Black Box ACI 600 ($25,000) was indeed deserving of coverage by the publication that awarded the three-box Bel Canto Black system "Best Amplification Product of 2015."
Billed as the "Ultimate…
The fabled Nelson Pass, whose 160 lb XA 200.8 class-A monoblocks are an essential part of my reference system, has just gone small with the first appearance of the Pass Labs XA25 class-A stereo amplifier ($4900). With a single pair of 700W devices per side, the single-ended amp delivers 25Wpc into 8 ohms and 50Wpc into 4 ohms, and is stable down to 0.5 ohm.
Of the amp, which was shown in passive display, Pass Labs' Desmond Harrington said, "We needed a smaller, lighter, and less expensive amplifier. A single human being can pick it up, and it can fit on a shelf. It's actually a little…
Several years ago, at a Consumer Electronics Show, Bob Stuart, then with Meridian Audio, took John Atkinson and me into a private room to demonstrate something new. He played individual tracks of mostly familiar recordings, twice each: first, straight from the commercial release, and then again, this time after processing with technology he was still developing. The differences were subtle, but usually we favored the second version. It was all very hush-hush, and despite our requests for technical information, Stuart spoke of his new process only in terms of results—as a way to recover the…
This arrangement is exactly the one I use with my other servers. The only special requirement for MQA was to make sure that all of JRiver's DSP options were turned off, including any up/downsampling, file conversion, and dither settings. It was also necessary to uncheck the box for "Open device with exclusive access."
Mmm-mmm, Good
Most of the recordings I'd requested from 2L were hi-rez DXD files (24/352.8)—the MQA versions downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to download the unprocessed originals. The batch of 10 original files (5.96GB) was more than six times larger than…