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Vitorino's music collection centers on blues, rock, and progressive rock. Pink Floyd, "the odd Dire Straits and U2," and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are among his faves and currently serve as examples as he learns to play guitar. Recently, he's been listening to electronic music, including Yello and Boris Blank, and to titles influenced by "the psychedelic Pink Floyd aesthetic." After citing David Gilmour's "Faces of Stone" and Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré's "Amandrai," he admitted, sheepishly, that he uses the Eagles' "Hotel California" to test equipment. As I contemplated playing…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Dedicated music server/ripper/streamer running Linux-based InnuOS operating system. Formats supported for ripping: FLAC (zero compression), WAV. Formats supported for playback: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, AAC, MP3, MQA (with supported DACs), DFF, DSF up to DSD128 via DoP, Native DSD on selected DACs. Ports: 2 OCXO-reclocked Ethernet Ports, 2 USB 2.0 (1 reclocked for output, 1 non-reclocked for input), 1 USB 3.0 (backup). Storage: 1TB to 4TB enterprise-grade SSD (EMI and vibration-treated). Memory: 8GB (4GB dedicated to memory playback). Library management…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital sources: dCS Rossini SACD/CD transport & Rossini DAC & Rossini Clock & Network Bridge; EMM Labs DV2 DAC; Roon Nucleus +; Linksys routers (2), Small Green Computer Systemoptique optical isolation bundle, TP-Link gigabit Ethernet media converters plus multimode duplex fiber optic cable (2); Small Green Computer linear power supply & Small Green Computer/HDPLEX four-component 200W linear power supply (2); external hard drives, SSD USB sticks, iPad Pro.
Power amplifiers: Dan D'Agostino Master Systems Progression monoblocks.
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Sidebar 3: Measurements
As with the Roon Nucleus+ that I reviewed in the August 2018 issue, it's difficult to determine what measurements would be meaningful with a product like the Innuos Statement. However, when I examined the analog output of an Ayre Acoustics QX-5 Twenty D/A processor with the Roon server, I did find that sourcing J-Test data via USB from the Nucleus+ gave a slightly cleaner spectrum than when the same data was sourced from my MacBook Pro laptop. The Ayre DAC has long since been returned to the manufacturer, but I did have three D/A processors with USB inputs that I…
I remember the only time i ever saw Chet Baker. It was at Parnell's, a jazz club in Pioneer Square in Seattle, long since defunct. It was a few years before Baker died under mysterious circumstances, in Amsterdam in 1988, after a life of creativity, notorious dissipation, and addiction.
Emaciated, with a caved-in face, he already looked near death. He played like an angel. I remember something that happened to me toward the end of the night. Sometimes last sets in jazz clubs, when the crowd has thinned, seem to exist outside of time. There came a moment when, almost alone with Baker's…
McDiarmid's largest group of live recordings was made at Smalls, a funky little basement dive in Greenwich Village. In the early years of the 2010s, the smallsLIVE label was a highly effective way for people outside New York to get to the city —in their minds. Most smallsLIVE albums were recorded either by McDiarmid/Countryman or by Jimmy Katz (whose engineering brilliance was the subject of my article in the August 2019 issue of Stereophile, Vol.42 No.8). Albums in the Live at Smalls series, like Jimmy Greene's, recorded by Katz, and Joel Frahm's, recorded by McDiarmid/Countryman, put you…
More Recordings
In addition to the recordings mentioned in the article, the following are recommended:
Ambrose Akinmusire: A Rift in Decorum, Live at the Village Vanguard
(Blue Note) Tyler McDiarmid, Geoffrey Countryman, engs.
Sonny Rollins: Way Out West
(Contemporary, also JVC XRCD and Analogue Productions SACD reissues) Roy DuNann, eng.
Bennie Wallace: The Old Songs
(AudioQuest, also JVC XRCD reissue) Roger Rhodes, eng.
Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Matka Joanna
(ECM) Jan Eric Kongshaug, eng.
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Landmarks in speaker design have been few and far between. There are a few certain contenders: in the UK, the original Quad Electrostatic and the ESL-63 qualify, while the Celestion SL600 scored a big point for all small monitors; the Spendor BC1 changed forever the notion that cone speakers were always colored and that big boxes were essential for good sound. In the States, Apogee has taught us much with their surprising mid-treble ribbon-based designs. Other technologies have shown promise but have not achieved real commercial success.
On the basis of reputation and personal experience…
Crossing over at approximately 2kHz, the HF driver is a well-established 1" dome from the French Focal company. Two points are of interest here: This cloth dome has a hard-cured impregnation and performs as a piston to quite high frequencies, in contrast to the early breakup behavior of the soft-dome tweeters almost universally used by other manufacturers. (Generally speaking, these are operating in well-damped resonant modes from 4kHz upward.) A hard-cloth dome resonance, however, may lie in the 15–25kHz range, though potentially it could still be audible (see the test results for the…
Sidebar 1: Measurements
Given the 1 ohm value for the impedance indicated by the specification, I first looked at the impedance characteristic to see whether it was really as difficult as indicated. On the normal chart my bottom line is 1 ohm; on the first run, the pen fell way below the line at 2kHz, impacting the limit stop. I then up-ranged by 10dB to set the base line at 0.32 ohms, and the WATT loading just kissed the 0.33 ohm level at 2kHz (fig.1). In some disbelief I felt the need to recalibrate the system and go for a manual static measurement; however, the same result was…