Analog Sources: Kuzma Stabi S turntable & Stogi S tonearm; Music Hall MMF-7.3 turntable; Denon DL-103, Goldring Elite MC, Ortofon 2M Bronze cartridges.
Digital Sources: Apple MacBook computer running Audirvana Plus; Halide DAC HD, PS Audio NuWave DACs; LG BD player; Western Digital T2 Mirror Drives (2).
Preamplification: Auditorium 23 A23 moving-coil step-up transformer, Heed Audio Quasar phono stage, Shindo Laboratory Allegro preamplifier.
Power Amplifier: Shindo Laboratory Haut-Brion.
Integrated Amplifier: Heed Audio Elixir.
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Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I used DRA Labs' MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Volti Rival's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 for the nearfield responses. (I measured Rival serial no.001.) Before carrying out any measurements, which were performed without the grille, I ensured that all the crossover resistor and capacitor choices on the rear panel were set as recommended in the manual.
The Volti's voltage sensitivity is specified as an unbelievable 100dB/W/m; ie, the Rival will play as loudly when fed 1W as a tiny LS3/5a…
It's a given that anyone who loves records and had the experience of working in a record store has vivid memories of being at work on Tuesdays when the UPS truck would bring the new releases for that week. The ritual was almost always the same. Like starved animals, vinyl-mad clerks, all in rock'n'roll t-shirts, many in an altered states even at 11 in the morning, would rip into boxes from Warner Bros, or Columbia, or whoever, and snatch their copies of the LPs they had to have—blowing most of their meager pay in the process. It took me years to realize that it might be best if I worked…
Twenty-four years after The Hilliard Ensemble and saxophonist Jan Garbarek recorded Officium, the first of their three haunting, century-crossing collaborations for ECM New Series, Trio Mediaeval has done something similar with trumpeter Arve Henriksen. On their latest ECM New Series album, Rímur, the vocal trio of Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fugiseth, and Berit Opheim teams up with Henriksen to produce timeless versions of chants, hymns, folk songs and improvisations based on Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish sources from earlier times.
Equal praise goes to the beauty of Rímur's early…
Herb Reichert auditioned the NEAT Iota Alpha in June 2017 (Vol.40 No.6):
My girlfriend, bb, and her garden friend Casey were hanging on the bed in my room as I installed NEAT Acoustics' diminutive Iota Alpha floorstanding speakers. Casey said, "Herb, what kind of speakers are those? They look like lawn dwarfs."
I told her to shush her smart-ass mouth. "These are serious British-made high-end audiophile speakers—and they cost $1995/pair!"
Then bb chimed in: "I like them! . . . better than all those other speakers you have. These don't dominate the room. They leave space to…
Last week, I embarked on a nearly three-hour public transportation trek from Queens to Cliffwood, NJ to take a tour of turntable and tonearm manufacturer VPI Industries, with Mat Weisfeld as my host. During the tour, I got to meet every member of the VPI family, learn about each step of the process, and get a firsthand look at a couple of unreleased products!
Here's the video tour of VPI:
E.S.P., recorded over three sessions in January 1965, marked a major turning point in the music of Miles Davis. Throughout his life—as a sideman to Charlie Parker in the 1940s, a rock-jazz fusionist in the '80s, and the many phases in between—Davis was a restless spirit, a cauldron of change, the spark of several evolutions in the history of jazz. But unlike his earlier shifts, which were followed by brief interludes of backpedaling (for instance, his reversion to hard bop and standards after the modal breakthrough in Kind of Blue), E.S.P. stands as his decisive pivot to modernism.
The…
"Let be."
Those two words, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, express an entire philosophy of life in one of the shortest sentences possible. The quotation may not be familiar, but the concept certainly is—contemporary equivalents, each with its own inflections of meaning, include: Shit happens. Let the game come to you. Keep calm and carry on. (I hate that one.) Paul McCartney wrote something similar, and only slightly less concise, in a late Beatles song.
It's Hamlet himself who says, "Let be," near the end of the play (Act V, scene ii). Things are going poorly. His beloved Ophelia has…
Other Things: The remote control is nice enough, with a plastic body, a brushed-aluminum faceplate, and backlit, tacky rubber buttons. It has a little weight to it, and can control everything in a PS Audio system (footnote 3): the DirectStream DAC, the company's new transport, and a phono preamp that, as far as I know, doesn't yet exist. All that functionality makes it a little crowded, but I much prefer this kind of clutter to the clutter of multiple remotes.
The balance control works fine. You can label the inputs. There's a home-theater bypass. And that headphone amplifier.
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Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Fully balanced hybrid line preamplifier with headphone amplifier. Tube complement: two hand-selected, matched 12AU7 dual-triodes. Analog inputs: 5 unbalanced (RCA), 5 balanced (XLR). Analog outputs: 1 pair balanced (XLR), 1 pair unbalanced (RCA). DC triggers: 2. Frequency response: 20Hz–20kHz, ±0.1dB; 0.1Hz–200kHz, –3dB. Input impedance: >66k ohms balanced, >33k ohms unbalanced. Output level: 4.0V RMS. Output impedance: <100 ohms. THD+IM at 1kHz (full scale): <0.03%. Headphone amplifier: output impedance, 0.5 ohm; output power, >200mW…