Answer honestly: During your impressionable youth, didn't you wonder how Perry Mason and Della Street disported themselves after office hours? (Hint: Microsoft Word's thesaurus suggests, as synonyms for disport, "play, fool, dally, caress, toy, fondle, tease, sport, and trifle." (footnote 1)
Wilson Benesch's Discovery loudspeakers strike me as a product Perry would have enjoyed…
Wilson Benesch was a pioneer in the use of carbon fiber in its turntables' tonearms. Increasing experience in using carbon fiber's combination of low mass, high rigidity, and high self-damping led WB to develop the breakthrough ACT (Advanced Composite Technology) One loudspeaker, the cabinet of which was predominantly carbon fiber.…
I'll reveal the true identity of X-10D in a moment. But I'll say straight off that for those of you with such CD players as the Marantz CD 63, RadioShack Optimus CD-3400, etc., this may be the most cost-effective CD upgrade ever to come down the pike.
Digital processors?
Nah. Do you want to spend $500…
Now I think there's a DAC that makes sense—the British Musical Fidelity X-DAC for $499.95, available exclusively by mail order from Audio Advisor, Inc. The unit is built into the same cylindrical chassis as the X-10D tubed whatchamacallit (some people call it an analog output stage), but the X-DAC is tubeless. If you want tubes, combine the X-DAC and the X-10D...all this stuff in this month's column does work beautifully in concert. If you want to complicate your life digitally, there are plenty of ways to do it!
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The conventional wisdom states that the more electronics one inserts into an analog signal path, the worse the resulting sound. This wisdom is true only to a point: Taking simplicity too far can result in a cure worse than the disease. At one extreme you have many excessively complicated circuits, far more than you'd ever really need to get the job done; by the time the music makes it through this tangle of electronics, it's been mangled. At the other extreme is a circuit so bare-bones it can't even accomplish the…
CD Transports & Players: Rotel RDD-980, NAD 510, Denon DCM-360.
Jitter-Reduction Boxes: Audio Alchemy DTI Plus, Monarchy Audio Digital Interface Processor, Theta Timebase Linque Conditioner.
D/A Converters: Audio Alchemy DAC-in-the-Box, Rotel RDD-980.
Preamplifiers: Audio Electronics AE-2 (The Bride of Zen), NAD 1600.
Power Amplifiers: home-built Zen SE MOSFET monoblocks, NAD 2100X.
Loudspeakers: B&W 804, Signet SL 256.
Loudspeaker Cables: Straight Wire Maestro, TARA RSC Reference Gen.2
Interconnects: Sound & Video (…
It's an appealing idea, using a purpose-built buffer to isolate the possibly wimpy output stages of inexpensive CD players. Many of the op-amp chips commonly used have only a limited ability to source current, for example, even if they can swing the necessary volts. In fact, back in the early '80s, I experimented with using first a discrete class-A headphone driver, then a class-A line-stage buffer, both designed by John Linsley Hood, to isolate my preamp from the very long interconnects I was then using.
I also tried reducing the…
Although it could be conjectured that the presence of tubes in the X-10D might add a certain thermionic something to its sound, there was nothing in the measurements that would confirm that hypothesis. In fact, the Musical Fidelity appears to use a well-engineered circuit, with no compromises that could be laid at the feet of its tubes.
The A-weighted S/N Ratio, for example, was an excellent 95dB (ref. 1V output), though this did decrease to 68.4dB, unweighted, across a wide 10Hz-500kHz bandwidth. The buffer's input impedance was high, at least 320k ohms,…
Description: Tube line-level buffer stage. Inputs: one pair on RCA jacks. Outputs: one pair on RCA jacks. Tube complement: two 6DJ8s. Input impedance: 470k ohms. Output impedance: ±200 ohms. Frequency response: 10Hz-100kHz ±0.2dB. S/N ratio: >112dB (A-weighted). THD: <0.005%, 10Hz-100kHz.
Dimensions: 4 3/8" (110mm) W by 4 3/8" (110mm) H by 8 5/8" (220mm) D.
Serial number of unit reviewed: XY00194.
Price: $199.95 (1997); no longer available (2003). Approximate number of dealers: mail-order only (1997); 55 (2003).
Manufacturer: Musical Fidelity,…