The abandoned site's reactor and turbine buildings now house NWAA Labs, a 13-year-old independent laboratory that…
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The setting is surreal. As you drive into the Satsop Business Park in rural Elma, Washington (pop. 3500, max), eyes immediately fixate on the looming 481'-tall cooling towers of an abandoned nuclear facility (footnote 1). Remnants of the largest nuclear power plant construction project in the United States (footnote 2), the site was mothballed in 1983, in part due to concerns triggered by reports of what had happened at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island four years earlier.
"If you're sitting in a bathtub with a 1" drain and a 3" input pipe, how long before the bathtub fills up? You've got to think about this for a second, because the drain is releasing water slower than it's coming in. What happens, where? Does it overflow at some point?"
Without hesitation, John responded, "It's going to reach an equilibrium point when the height of the water forces the water out of the 1" drain as fast as it is coming in from the 3" pipe."
"Bingo," replied Ron. "The pressure is going to change. It's the one thing that's not shown. As you increase the level of…
Sidebar: NWAA's Ron Sauro on Shape and Absorption
Our conversation moved back and forth between absorption and diffusion. When, later, Ron attempted to separate the two, he produced a mini treatise on absorption. Lightly edited, that treatise follows.
Absorption is the most common treatment used in listening rooms. The measurement of absorption was first described by Wallace Sabine, who compared the reverberation times of a room with and without absorption. This difference was then converted to units of absorption using this formula:
A = 0.9210(V*d/c)
where
A =…
Since 1995, Michael Griffin's Essential Sound Products (ESP) has focused on manufacturing quality power cables for audiophiles. Then, starting with its Music Cord, Michael began manufacturing cords for musicians and recording studios. Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz, for example, use ESP power cables in their recording projects.
Different construction is essential for different uses. For audiophiles, for example, ESP features solid conductors. But solid conductors are not the best for professional musicians who constantly plug and unplug cables as they haul them from place to place. All…
When I entered the room shared by Ken Stevens' CAT (Convergent Audio Technology) and Michael D. Griffin's ESP (Essential Sound Products), recording engineers/life partners Jim Anderson (above) and Ulrike Schwarz (below, with Jim) were finishing up a talk/demonstration about recording Patricia Barber's album Clique. They are not the only world-class engineers I've encountered who, standing well to the side and above speakers' tweeters, played tracks so loud that voice and instruments spread and distorted. But in soft passages, and once they'd turned the volume down, the beautiful liquidity of…
With the support of Seattle's 76-year-old Hawthorne Stereo, Focal Naim America presented a system described by the company's Tom Graham as "The best of the best of what Focal and Naim have to offer." The sound in the large room was extremely open and spacious on a 16/44.1 wireless stream of a very naïve sounding soprano singing the "Pie Jesu" from John Rutter's Requiem. (For a very different take on the solo, check out the Reference Recordings classic.)
Another show favorite, Lyle Lovett's "North Dakota," displayed a very clean, round sound with a glowing illumined core. Cymbals were…
The email read, in part, like an equipment list with Herb Reichert's name on it. The room had one raison d'être: to showcase Pure AudioProject's Trio15 Classic open-baffle speaker ($9740/pair), which includes a Voxativ AC-PiFe wooden-cone center driver and three 15" woofers custom-manufactured for PureAudioProject by Eminence. To do so, Ze'ev (Wolf) Schlik paired his speaker with Pass Labs' INT-25 integrated amplifier ($7500) and XP-17 phono preamp ($4300), the Denafrips Terminator Plus DAC ($6400), and VPI Industries' Avenger turntable ($12,000) with Shyla cartridge ($2000).
One…
Of the two systems in Parasound's large room, time only allowed a listen to the big one. Given that room's entire front wall was composed of outward-facing glass, Parasound's Phil Jackson had no choice but to opt for heavy draping that, as with all heavy draping, nipped depth in the bud.
I initially typed "death" rather than depth. Whatever that may say about my own internal preoccupations, it does not reflect on the core of the system's sound, which was gratifying alive without being hot or splashy.
On a track from Arturo Sandoval's Trumpet Evolution, the system did a fine job…
If any company's sonic signature has changed from the first time I encountered it, it's Dan Wright's ModWright. While Dan still does tube modifications to products from other companies—his Cambridge CXN V2 Tube Modification ($1500/mod only) to the Cambridge DAC was part of the show system—the KWH225i class-AB Hybrid Integrated ($9750), PH9.0X Tube Phono Stage ($4750), and world debut Analog Bridge (maybe $2900/TBD) are 100% ModWright.
The latter, which comes with two selectable RCA inputs and two selectable RCA outputs—fully balanced XLR inputs and outputs are an optional add-on—…
As at T.H.E. Show in Long Beach, I was smitten by the round, colorful, and illumined sound of Thrax Spartacus 300B monoblocks ($97,500/pair). Seduced, won over, serenaded into submission. And then some.
In a not exactly modest ¾-million dollar system that also included a Hifistay Mythology Rack System ($5200/shelf), UHA SuperDeck ($90,000), Thrax Libra 300B stereo preamplifier ($65,500), Thrax Maximinus Mk II 32/384 DAC ($38,500), Vitus SCD 25 Mk II ($26,400), and, in a change from last time, Børresen 05 Silver Supreme Edition loudspeakers ($214,500/pair), Synergistic Research…