Hough not only has a special fondness for the little gems of yesteryear; he is also gifted with the ability to imbue pieces that…
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Inveterate news junkies of the world, your way out has come. For at least one good hour of your otherwise doom-laden day, you have a reason to turn off Fox or CNN and drift on feathery clouds to a far sweeter place. Your exit has been most graciously supplied by pianist Stephen Hough—he of Stephen Hough's Dream Album—whose latest recorded achievement may well be hailed as the most engaging, charming, and delightful recording of the year... or even the decade.
The blowout happened as I climbed the stairs from the basement, where I'd just spent two hours listening to musi on my hi-fi. Standing rigidly in the archway, a wet sheen of hurt trembling in her eyes, my wife shouted: "You love your audio more than you love me!"
It erupted with such raw emotional force that I knew exactly what she meant, and that she was right: I spent more quality time with my audio than I did with her—or, for that matter, with either of my two homebound teenagers. It was nothing personal; my listening room is my private safe place, conceived and realized in my own…
In a series of recent feature articles for Stereophile, Jim Austin has examined how the controversial MQA codec works: "MQA Tested, Part 1," "MQA Tested Part 2: Into the Fold," "MQA Contextualized," "MQA, DRM, and Other Four-Letter Words," and, most recently, "MQA: Aliasing, B-Splines, Centers of Gravity." I doubt there is a Stereophile reader who is unaware of the fracas associated with MQA, and I have been repeatedly criticized on web forums for describing its underlying concept as "elegant."
But elegant it is, I feel. MQA Ltd.'s Bob Stuart has described the goal of MQA as being to…
I shouldn't have been surprised. When I interviewed Charley Hansen (who, sadly, passed away in November 2017) in 2012 about the design of the QA-9, he explained that "instead of using the normal low-pass Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter to turn the output of the delta-sigma DAC into PCM, we use a moving-average filter. This doesn't just allow for improved transient response, but actually perfect transient response. . . . There is no pre-ringing, no post-ringing—no ringing whatsoever."
Sample-Rate Conversion
These results reveal that, with the exception of the dCS 904 with its F4…
Comments from Bob Stuart
This is an interesting article, my thanks to John Atkinson for the opportunity to clarify.
The article shows measurements of A/D and D/A cascades; however, these are not measurements of MQA. The diagram below may clarify.
The diagram shows the structure of a typical MQA Decoder (dotted box), connected to a paired D/A converter. There are two signal paths. In the upper path, when an incoming MQA stream is detected, the MQA decode proceeds, first to unfold to the 'MQA Core' signal (typically at 2x, ie, 88.2 or 96kHz) and then to the MQA…
In 2017, Stereophile was accepted into the Expert Imaging and Sound Association (EISA—the E back then stood for European), as the exclusive US member of the EISA's Hi-Fi Expert Group. (At the same time, our sister magazine Sound & Vision was inducted as the exclusive US member of the HT Video Expert Group.)
EISA is the biggest and, at nearly 40 years, the oldest general consumer-electronics awards association in the world; its members include 50 special-interest magazines in over 23 European countries and, now, the US, Canada, India, and Australia. Through its annual Awards program,…
The following awards were presented in the non-HiFi categories:
HOME THEATRE AUDIO EXPERT GROUP
EISA HOME THEATRE AMPLIFIER 2018–2019
Denon AVC-X8500H
EISA HOME THEATRE RECEIVER 2018–2019
Pioneer VSX-933
EISA HOME THEATRE SPEAKER SYSTEM 2018–2019
KEF Q Series
EISA BEST BUY HOME THEATRE SPEAKER SYSTEM 2018–2019
Jamo S 809 HCS / S 810 SUB / S 8 ATM
EISA HOME THEATRE IN-WALL SPEAKER 2018–2019
Focal 300IWLRC6 / 300IW6
EISA SOUNDBAR 2018–2019
LG SK10Y
EISA BEST BUY SOUNDBAR 2018–2019
Polk…
Jim Austin returned to the Apple HomePod in September 2018 (Vol.41 No.9):
When I reviewed Apple's HomePod smart speaker for the August 2018 issue, I found Apple's virtual assistant, Siri, less helpful than annoying (if also, at times, amusing). I was very impressed, though, with the sound of this unusual speaker, with its upfiring 4" woofer and array of seven horn-loaded tweeter/midrange drivers. Apple was already planning a software update that would allow two HomePods to be used as a stereo pair, and I'd promised a Follow-Up review when they did.
Mere days after submitting that…
Pärt: The Symphonies
Tõnu Kaljuste, NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic
ECM 2600 (CD). 2018. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Andrzej Sasin, Aleksandra Nagorko, engs. DDD. TT: 79:40
Performance *****
Sonics *****
Tõnu Kaljuste, NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic
ECM 2600 (CD). 2018. Manfred Eicher, prod.; Andrzej Sasin, Aleksandra Nagorko, engs. DDD. TT: 79:40
Performance *****
Sonics *****
Arvo Pärt is now so popular that it's no longer necessary to explain him. His piety is approachably beautiful and welcoming. He was not born composing his airy, contemplative, trademark "tintinnabular" (bell-like) music; up to the early 1970s, he cut his teeth on the 12-tone scale. His four symphonies, presented here on one CD for the first time, take us through that part of his…
Some of my reviewer colleagues would have you believe that negative reviews are the most difficult of all to write, and that positive reviews fairly write themselves. What nonsense!
As I write this, my copy deadline is three days away, yet I've succeeded at crafting little more than my heading (easy enough: it's just the product's name, followed by my name) and my Associated Equipment sidebar (also easy), leaving a great expanse of nothing in between. That's mostly because the Kalista DreamPlay One, a two-box CD player whose $43,000 price might once have kept me from even considering it…