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I'm happy to say that some of that upper-mid graininess turned out to be a matter of (additional) running in, as is the case with so many speakers. After about three weeks of fairly steady use, the Maargas' upper mids lost some of their excess texture—but not all. Neil Young's vocals in "Speakin' Out" and other selections on Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live (LP, Reprise 566051-1) remained overly textured and thus a bit fatiguing in the long haul. (The same was true of Nils Lofgren's hammy guitar solos: His guitar sounded less like a Strat and more like an especially gritty Telecaster.) The…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Floorstanding loudspeaker with a single horn-loaded full-range driver and a pair of powered, isobaric-loaded woofers. Drive units: 8" twin-cone driver with 25mm-diameter voice-coil and high-compliance surround; two 6" × 9" paper-cone woofers. Frequency range: 28Hz–20kHz. Sensitivity: 98dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Minimum required amplifier power: 2W.
Dimensions: 41.2" (1035mm) H × 7.5" (190mm) W × 21.6" (550mm) D. Weight: 62lb (28kg).
Finishes: Piano black or wood veneer sides with metallic gray pipes, standard; additional colors…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog sources: Garrard 301 and Thorens TD 124 turntables; EMT 997 tonearm; Ortofon SPU Century and EMT TSD 15 pickup heads.
Digital sources: Hegel Music Systems Mohican CD player, Mytek Liberty D/A processor.
Preamplification: Auditorium 23 Hommage T1 & T2 and EMIA Phono step-up transformers, Shindo Laboratory Monbrison (2017) preamplifier.
Power amplifiers: Air Tight ATM-300R, Shindo Laboratory Haut-Brion, Shindo Laboratory Cortese, Jadis Orchestra Black.
Loudspeakers: Altec Flamenco, DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/93.
Cables: Digital…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
After driving to Sasha Matson's place in upstate New York last September to measure the Wilson Sasha DAW speakers that he reviewed in the January issue, I stopped off at Art Dudley's place in Albany on my way home the next day to measure the Rethm Maargas. As always, I used DRA Labs' MLSSA system and a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the Maarga's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield and spatially averaged room responses. I used my usual Krell KSA-50 amplifier for the quasi-anechoic measurements but measured…
Sidebar 4: Manufacturer's Comment
Editor: Let me start by thanking Art, John, and Jim for their kindness and consideration in allowing me to take it back to them for a relisten, and for remeasuring, which involved quite a bit of inconvenience for both Art and John.
Art's analogy of different cakes for different people is one of the truisms of the sensory world, be it touch, smell, taste, sight, or sound. Aesthetics, by its very nature, is genetically bound to subjectivity.
We have designed these speakers around a set of criteria that we felt would bring its reproduction…
(February 28) High End 2020, aka Munich High End, has been canceled “due to the current worsening trend with respect to the spread of the novel coronavirus.” Citing a rapid increase in infections in Italy “within a few days,” and uncertainty as to how the virus will continue to spread in Europe, Stefan Dreischärf, Managing Director of High End Society Service GmbH declared, “We consider it our responsibility to act in a timely manner.”
The press release also revealed that, at the beginning of February, the society offered Chinese exhibitors options for leaving the show. Since then, the…
The stars are matter. We are matter. But it doesn't matter.—Don Van Vliet
Only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.—T.S. Eliot (writing about Djuna Barnes's Nightwood)
In the 17th century, steam engines began appearing throughout Europe and Asia, ushered into existence by any number of different inventors. More recently, multiple inventors conceived and cooked up the atomic bomb, the jet engine, and the solid-body electric guitar. Virtually every race of Homo sapiens has invented the bow and arrow, and people on at least three different continents invented…
Stereophile's enduringly healthy circulation suggests widespread support for the multiplicity of voices in our pages, and virtually every month that notion is confirmed by letters from our readers. Most of our reviewers have their fans and their detractors, and although it's been a long time since I've seen a letter demanding the head of this or that reviewer, we still occasionally hear from readers who want us to know they trust Herb or John or me or Mikey or Kal or someone else above all others.
Because the quest for wisdom is not a zero-sum game, it's possible for Stereophile to print…
The image above is not a modernist oil painting. It's an airport x-ray of my friend Jeffrey Jackson's backpack.
Can you identify its contents? Did you notice the red rectangle alerting the inspector of a suspicious object? Do you know what that suspicious object is? Or what it is worth?
That ominous-looking black silhouette is a 1930s-era Western Electric 555W "receiver"—ie, a compression driver for use with a horn. It's about 10" in diameter and weighs around 15lb. It requires a 7V DC/1.4A power supply for its field-coil magnet and would cost about $8000 to replace.
In…
Input signals were generated by mono and stereo LPs traced by a variety of stereo phono cartridges with their coils connected in series (for mono) by an adaptor at the end of the tonearm cable. The phono cartridges fed one channel of a Slagle step-up transformer, leading to one channel of a Slagle/Jackson–designed inductance-resistance (LR) phono preamp: an RIAA stage that uses no signal capacitors or coupling capacitors. That fed one of Slagle's famous autoformer volume controls, which in turn fed Jackson's single-ended, transformer-coupled 50 tube amp, which makes maybe 2 watts. (The globe…