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Moore, who was a Buddhist for 15 years, quickly regained his sanguinity. "It's hard to argue with success," he said, smiling again. "Okay, I'm not crazy about 'Baby Shark' (an earworm of a children's song by Korea's Pinkfong that racked up a record-breaking seven billion views on YouTube), but in general when something is successful, I go, 'Hey, that did something, what happened there.' There's a story that Quincy Jones once walked across the A&M lot with a Peter Frampton record under his arm. Someone came up to him and said, 'Quincy, what are you doing? What's the Frampton album for?'…
Further comments from Stereophile June 1970 (Vol.2 No.10):
The Altec A-7-500 offers a highly efficient, rather forward sound for use in large to very large listening rooms or for very-high-volume "Row A" listening in smaller rooms; sound is rather forward but smooth; relatively little "horn" coloration; drivers excellently blended; bass moderately deep (useful to around 50Hz in most rooms), very tight, well defined; highs smooth and rather soft, yielding most-natural high-end quality at high listening levels; stereo imaging fairly good but optimum listening area somewhat small; an…
Evidence is nothing without judgments.—The Lord Leto Atreides II in God Emperor Of Dune, by Frank Herbert
In college, I majored in physics, but I took a lot of theater courses. Not acting—I never had any affinity for that—but all the other aspects of theater: set design, directing, theory of performance, playwriting. One professor, a playwright himself, offered some advice to his students that has served me well ever since: To learn the craft, observe your response first, then look to the text to figure out what about it caused you to respond the way you did.
It was an important…
There's a school of thought that maintains that among all hi-fi components, the D/A converter is easiest to perfect or come close to perfecting. Just make sure that every sample is converted accurately, that there's little rolloff in the audioband, that aliased images are suppressed almost completely, and that background noise is extremely low, and you have a top-quality D/A processor. Use of a high-quality DAC chip is assumed.
The transport part of the player is even easier to nail, this thinking goes, because all it needs to do is extract the data accurately, something any box-store CD…
CH Precision's approach to optimizing timing in digital audio has much in common with the MQA approach. CH Precision tries to achieve as much time compaction as possible without having access to information about the ADCs used in the original digital conversion—and, of course, without MQA's controversial "audio origami," which reduces file size. Of course, MQA wasn't the first to think about these things, either. Heeb told me that this line of thinking goes back at least to the late 1980s, to Luxman's Fluency DAC, a design based on the splines-related DSP work of Professor Kazuo Toraichi of…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: CD/SACD/MQA-CD player/transport supporting "Red Book" CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MQA CD, hybrid and single-layer. 800 × 480, 24-bit AMOLED display. User control via dual-concentric rotary knob with push function, CH Control Android app, and remote control. Digital outputs: CH Link HD (proprietary) supporting high-definition uncompressed audio and control; data rates: 16/44.1 or 24/88.2kHz (CD, MQA CD); 1 bit/2.8224MHz (SACD); AES3: 16/44.1 or 24/88.2kHz (CD, MQA CD); 24/44.1, 88.2, 176.4kHz or 1/2.8224MHz DoP (SACD); S/PDIF (RCA) 16/44.1 or 24/88.2kHz (CD,…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital sources: Intel NUC computer with SSD drive running Roon Optimized Core Kit, Roon Nucleus+; Denafrips Avatar CD transport; Synology DS918+ 4-bay Network Attached Storage device with 16TB; TP-Link 8-Port Gigabit network switch (unmanaged); dCS Rossini DAC.
Preamplification: Pass Labs XP-25 phono preamplifier, Pass Labs XP-22 line preamplifier.
Power amplifiers: Pass Labs XA60.8 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Wilson Audio Specialties Alexx V.
Cables: Digital: AudioQuest Carbon & Cinnamon & Coffee, Comprehensive Connectivity DXLRP-…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
I tested the CH Precision D1.5 SACD/CD player/transport with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system. As the D1.5 doesn't have digital inputs, I assessed its performance, using its own power supply and internal clock, with a Sony test SACD and a CD-R with 16-bit test signals.
I used the Pierre Verany Digital Test CD, which has gaps of various lengths in the data spiral, to check the D1.5's error correction. The Compact Disc Standard requires only that a player cope with gaps of up to 0.2mm in length, but the D1.5 played the tracks with gaps up to 2mm without…
Manufacturer's Comment
We would like to thank Jim Austin and John Atkinson for conducting such an in-depth and exhaustive review of our D1.5 CD/SACD player/transport.
John Atkinson's measurements are completely correct in identifying the early rolloff on CD replay, and Jim is also correct in suggesting that this might well be atypical. The measured results suggest that the machine is using a minimum-phase apodizing filter rather than the proprietary PEtER spline filter that should be engaged.
It seems that the software in the (preproduction) D1.5 supplied for review has…
Bill Callahan And Bonnie Prince Billy: Blind Date Party
Drag City Records (16/44.1kHz FLAC, Qobuz; also available on LP, CD, and cassette tape). 2021. Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy, prods.
Performance ****
Sonics ***
Drag City Records (16/44.1kHz FLAC, Qobuz; also available on LP, CD, and cassette tape). 2021. Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy, prods.
Performance ****
Sonics ***
Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy—the latter is a stage name for Will Oldham—did not set out to make an album together. They were just trying fill the long pandemic months with music. In 2020, they started singing other people's songs together, broadcasting them to fans via Zoom. They recorded the tracks, choosing a different guest musician to…