Photo: John Atkinson
On one level, this was just "another CES." The barrage of humanity, traffic, flashing lights, cigarette smoke, hawkers, gawkers, noise masquerading as music, and the ever-present Las Vegas Strip above was such that, as I entered the Venetian on the last day, all I could think of was the promise that, before the night was over, I would be back amongst the trees, silence, and rejuvenating peace of our home in Port Townsend, WA.
But on a deeper level, the "high-performance" audio displays in and around CES 2015 signaled anything but business as usual. Take a look…
Richard Vandersteen points to the detailed improvements to his flagship Model Seven speaker, which produced one of my best sounds at the 2015 CES. The major change is to the tweeter and its environment. Still using a unique balsa/alloy sandwich dome, this has been brought into better alignment of its acoustic center with that of the midrange unit, which has in turn meant changing the design of the grille to optimize its acoustic environment. This has resulted in less hand-adjustment of the crossover, to give a more easily achieved consistency in manufacturing. Other changes to the subwoofer…
Canadian manufacturer Bryston is known for its amplifiers but it is a loudspeaker that gets the cover treatment this month. Kalman Rubinson likes what he heard from this mid-priced tower, while John Atkinson spends some of his valuable listening time with a speaker that costs less than $60/pair. “Affordable” is also the name of the game both with VPI’s Nomad record player and GoldenEar’s awesome Triton One speaker reviewed in this issue. But it is our annual “Records to Die For” that headlines this issue: our editors and writers review 54 albums, ranging from chamber music to psychedelia,…
Aerial Acoustics, the speaker firm that Michael Kelly conceived a quarter-century ago with David Marshall, is headquartered north of Boston, not far from the Merrimack River Valley region that once produced textiles and shoes by the trainload. Kelly, though, is quick to equate Aerial with far more distant firms. His industrial models are in Germany, where he lived for a while when his father, a US Army officer, was based there, and where he later spent time as a vice-president of a/d/s/, which had been founded by a German-born and -educated scientist, Godehard Günther, who died last October…
Lander: How do you go about fabricating such an enclosure?
Kelly: You build the inner cabinet, then you build the outer one around it, then you clamp it down and glue it at the same time. There's also bracing. It runs through holes in the walls of the inner cabinet, and connects to the outer cabinet to reinforce the entire enclosure.
Lander: What other Aerial speakers do you see as significant?
Kelly: Our first center speaker. Back in the late '90s, home theater started to become very strong, and center speakers are critical to home theater, so we introduced our CC3. (…
Everything these days has a computer inside it, but you wouldn't call a car a computer. Same goes for music streamers—what we at AudioStream.com also call network players. While a network player has a computer inside, I don't consider it a computer because it's designed to do just one thing: play music.
A network player connects to your home network via Ethernet or WiFi, searches for network-attached storage (NAS), looks for the Internet to connect to streaming services, and serves up all of this music through an app that typically resides on a smartphone or tablet. The theory goes that…
Listening to the MiND was pretty much pure pleasure. I connected it to my network switch with a length of AudioQuest Diamond Ethernet cable, and to the Auralic Vega digital audio processor via AES/EBU. The Vega was in turn connected to my Pass INT-30A integrated amp, which powered a pair of DeVore Fidelity The Nines speakers. Compared to my stock MacBook Pro running Pure Music 2 or Audirvana, the MiND appeared to offer a lower noise floor—there were greater senses of microdetail and dynamic contrast in Tom Waits's Alice (CD rip, Anti-). There was a newfound purity to the sound of my NAS-…
Sidebar Contacts
Simaudio Ltd., 95 Chemin du Tremblay Street, Unit 3, Boucherville, Quebec J4B 7K4, Canada. Tel: (450) 449-2212. Web: www.simaudio.com.
Auralic Limited, 1F, Building No.7, 1A Chaoqian Road, Beijing 102200, China. Tel: (86) (0)10-57325784. Auralic North America Inc., 12208 NE 104th Street, Vancouver, WA 98682. Tel: (360) 326-8879. Web: www.auralic.com.
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try.—Homer Simpson
Months ago, as we put together the most recent installment of "Recommended Components," Phillip Holmes, of Mockingbird Distribution, got in touch and asked if we would please remove from our list the Abis SA-1 tonearm, which Mockingbird distributes (and which I first wrote about in our March 2014 issue, footnote 1). As it turns out, Abis is making some changes to the arm, and Holmes didn't think it would be right to let the recommendation endure until we'd had a chance to try the new one.
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While Dolby Atmos, which adds height information to both cinema soundtracks and domestic surround-sound reproduction has created a strong buzz in the mainstream market for home-theater A/V receivers and preamplifier-processors, it's too early to know what, if any, impact it will have on music-only recordings. I'm not sanguine about the prospects—as impressive as I've found Atmos to be for movies, the expansion of sources to the vertical plane would seem to be of little value for music performed on acoustic instruments. Moreover, it seems unlikely that mainstream record labels will adopt this…
