“Our party’s been at the same Mexican restaurant for the past 19 years and I have an incredible superstition that if the bar tab is not bigger than the food tab then we’ve had a bad year.”
Admitting that the Bloodshot offices in Chicago that afternoon are not “a buzzing little hive,” but resemble something more akin to a “slothful, shambling kind of thing,” Miller roused himself long enough to discuss Bloodshot’s 20th anniversary and While No One Was Looking,…
Everything? After a quarter century of measuring the performance of audio components for this magazine, I'm not so sure that we have a firm handle on what makes audio products sound different from one another. Even when it comes to measuring loudspeakers, it can be difficult to characterize their performance in an objective manner. For a case in point, see my review of…
Digital Sources: Ayre Acoustics C-5xeMP universal player; Apple 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini running OS10.9.3, iTunes 11, Pure Music 2.0, Audirvana Plus 1.5.10; PS Audio PerfectWave DirectStream D/A processor; dCS Vivaldi upsampling D/A system.
Preamplification: Ayre Acoustics KX-R Twenty line preamplifier.
Power Amplifiers: Pass Labs XA60.5 monoblocks.
Cables: Digital: AudioQuest Coffee, Belkin Gold USB, Kubala-Sosna Elation! AES/EBU, Transparent USB (with dCS Vivaldi). FireWire: AudioQuest FireWire 400 (prototype). Interconnect (balanced): AudioQuest Wild…
I turned to SVS's Merlin. When the setup advisor asked for my satellite speakers, I typed in "Quad ESL-989." It recommended running the Quads full range and setting the SB13-Ultra's low-pass corner frequency to 40Hz, 24dB/octave.
Voilà! Nicks's voice lost the coloration, and…
Description: Front-firing, sealed-box, powered subwoofer. Drive-unit: 13.5" Rohacell composite cone with 3", bifilar-wound aluminum voice-coil and underhung motor structure. Inputs: balanced (XLR) and unbalanced (RCA) for two channels, trigger. Outputs: balanced (XLR) for each channel to additional subwoofer. Controls: input level (High/Low); Power; Integrated Function Controller (IFC) knob with 2-line display to control volume level, high- and low-pass filter (Enable, Slope, Frequency), phase, high-pass delay (milliseconds), room gain compensation (Enable, 40,…
Analog Sources: Linn Sondek turntable with Lingo power supply, Linn Ittok tonearm; Spectral MC cartridge; Day-Sequerra 25 Year Reference FM tuner.
Digital Sources: Bryston BCD-1 CD player & BDP-2 media player & BDA-1 DAC.
Preamplifier: Bryston BP-26.
Power Amplifiers: Theta Digital Prometheus monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Quad ESL-989; JL Audio Fathom f113, Velodyne DD-18+, B&W DB1, Revel Rhythm2 subwoofers.
Cables: Digital: WireWorld Starlight Coaxial. Interconnect: Mark Levinson Silver, Red Rose Silver One, Totem Acoustic Sinew…
Naxos claims that its service, which costs $14.99/month, is the first in the US to use "adaptive bitrate streaming technology." They further…
An annual event now for 11 years, Winter Jazzfest has evolved into a more-than-worthy successor to the festival sponsored in the 1990s by the now-defunct TriBeCa club called the Knitting Factory as a downtown-laced alternative to the staid morass into which the uptown Kool Jazz Festival had degenerated at the time.
This…
For our part, Jon Iverson is poised to cover new products digital, Herb Reichert "affordable" products in all categories (go easy on us, boys…