search

Listening #196

The world's a place of horrors
Because each man thinks he's right—Loudon Wainwright III

As a teen, I loved spending time in musical-instrument shops. Now, with exceptions, the experience is reliably depressing.

Last Saturday was exemplary: I walked into my local supermarket of sound to buy a set of guitar strings, and was at once assaulted by the racket of two gunslingers trying to outshoot each other. Combatant No.1, a fiftysomething male with an elaborate dye job, had hold of a new Martin dreadnought acoustic guitar, on which he aggressively demonstrated his repertoire of…

Listening #196 Page 2

Nothing, that is, except for me to hold Julia and her mother, Janet, hostage to my crank-literary whims: We drove to a friend's house in Troy, New York, and put our chicken in their oven. Then I got out my computer and went directly to the source with the following questions about women and their relationships with domestic audio. (For the record, Janet owns a Rega Planar 3 turntable in Union Jack finish, Julia a Thorens TD 124 Mk.II turntable in cream enamel. Both collect and regularly buy LPs.) Here is a transcript of our conversation:

ART: Do you consider yourselves to be feminists…

Robert's Final Report from the 2019 Montreal Audio Fest

Magico's three-way A3 speakers ($CD13,000) were the first things I spotted when I entered Sonor-Filtronique's third room. I fondly remembered them from last year—in my 2018 report, I gushed over the sound of the A3s, then driven by Ayre electronics. Magico's most affordable model, the A3 has an enclosure made of 6061 T6 aircraft-grade aluminum, while their drivers boast diaphragms made of beryllium and graphene.

Driven by Luxman's solid-state, class-A, 30Wpc, phono stage-equipped L-590AXII integrated amplifier ($CD11,695), the same company's DSD-compatible DA-06 USB DAC ($CD6495…

JA Wraps up his Montreal Report

As well as live music, the Montreal show offered a full schedule of seminars. Roon's Steve Silberman presented two seminars to packed houses on Saturday on getting the best from the Roon music app and the Roon Nucleus servers, including how to take advantage of the system's powerful DSP engine.

While the Roon seminars were held in the large St-Laurent 7 room, most of the other seminars took place in the smaller Outremont 3 room. Presenters included VTL's Luke Manley answering the question "Why Tubes?" and VPI's founder Harry Weisfeld talking turntables. I took in Elac's Andrew…

Art's Montreal Wrap: How the Ouest Was Won

At the Montreal Audio Fest, Graham Audio's North American distributor, On A Higher Note, brought along the British speaker manufacturer's latest variation on the BBC-monitor theme: the LS5/9f ($US7995/pair in oak, as shown), described as a floorstanding version of the BBC-designed LS5/9 stand-mounter. According to On A Higher Note's Philip O'Hanlon, seen above, the LS5/9f was created by Derek Hughes, the son of the founders of Spendor (themselves once a BBC licensee—this is slightly complicated). Hughes reportedly intended the extra cabinetry to support the speaker without adding to its…

Fischer's Glorious Mahler Seventh

The first and only time I heard a live performance of Mahler's five-movement Symphony No.7, from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, I left Davies Symphony Hall confused. The bad press that the 70+ minute work has received for over a century, mainly for its innate ambiguity, convinced me that it was, at best, a problematic work—one that Mahler might have eventually revised had he lived long enough. But after listening to DSD128 files of Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra's new recording of the symphony for Channel Classics, released March 29 in SACD format, I'…

Audia Flight FLS1 preamplifier

Our conservative two-channel audio world doesn't easily accept change. Not that many years ago, even remote control was considered a sign of electronic moral decay certain to degrade sound quality. Today, home theater–like operating systems, with their fluorescent-screen hells and microprocessor-controlled functionality are commonplace, even in the highest of fi. Consumers accustomed to the convenience of audio/video processors now demand it on every price tier of two-channel hi-fi, though purists who think sound quality is commensurate with inconvenience can have that if they want it.

…

Audia Flight FLS1 preamplifier Page 2

Wow! Simply miked, recorded with an Ampex 354 tubed tape deck, and mastered by Bernie Grundman, this record is a stunner! Those two geezers are right! My bad—and my loss—for never having played it! Recorded live in a Montreal church, this production has it all: huge space, and a brass quintet that goes low with a bass trombone and high with a piccolo trumpet. And, of course, there's that pants-flapping pipe organ. Enrico O. Dastous's arrangement is so canny that I don't miss the orchestra—each movement sounds and feels fully fleshed out and complete.

I seriously enjoyed this album…

Audia Flight FLS1 preamplifier Specifications

Sidebar 1: Specifications

Description: Solid-state, fully balanced, dual-mono preamplifier with built-in headphone amplifier and slots for optional phono preamplifier and DAC. Inputs: 2 balanced (XLR), 3 unbalanced (RCA). Outputs: 1 balanced (XLR), 1 unbalanced (RCA), 1 fixed-level Record out (RCA). Gain: –90dB to +10dB. Gain resolution: 0.5dB. Frequency response: 0.3Hz–500kHz, –3dB. THD: <0.05%. Signal/noise: 110dB. Input impedance: 47k ohms. Output impedance: <1 ohm. Headphone output: 12Wpc RMS into 8 ohms. Optional phono preamplifier gain: MM, 46dB; MC, 66dB.
Dimensions: 17.…

Audia Flight FLS1 preamplifier Associated Equipment

Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment

Analog Sources: Continuum Audio Labs Caliburn turntable & Castellon stand; Rega Research Planar 8, Thales TTT Compact II turntables; Kuzma 4Point, Swedish Analog Technologies CF1-09, Thales Statement tonearms. Phono cartridges: Air Tight Coda; Grado Labs Epoch (mono); Lyra Atlas, Atlas SL, Atlas SL mono, Etna, Etna SL; Miyajima Laboratory Infinity (mono); Ortofon MC Century, Anna A95.
Digital Sources: dCS Vivaldi One CD/SACD and Network Player, dCS Rossini Player. Lynx Hilo A/D-D/A converter, Meridian Digital Media System, Pure Vinyl & Vinyl…