Heading the system was SteinMusic's new Topline Bob L Ultimate speaker ($247,500/pair), a 4-way…
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SteinMusic's apparent paradox, a striking black-and-white equipment array that's on track to win my Looker Award of High End 2023 but that delivered maximally colorful sound, attracted throngs to the company's room. On Sir Simon Rattle's recording of Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite, performed by the City of Birmingham Orchestra, and Musica Nuda's live recording of "I Will Survive," Holger Stein's system delivered an arresting three-dimensional soundstage and marvelous range of colors.
After a lot of hard work, Vitus Audio arrived in Munich with a new Signature DAC, the SD-025 Mk.II (26,500), and new SM-103 Mk.II monoblock amplifiers (70,000/pair). Allied with other Vitus equipment (see below), the system offered bountiful color, snap, and excellent low bass on a CD of Mathias Heise performing "Quadrillion." Having just viewed a bit of a Heise's live performance of the piece, I find myself extremely grateful for the opportunity to close my eyes and focus solely on the music.
The SD-025 Mk.II includes a new streamer board that supports gigabit network…
Even if Darren Myers's name isn't familiar, you still may have heard—or at least heard about—hi-fi components he designed, including the PS Audio Stellar phono preamp, which garnered Stereophile's Analog Product of the Year Award in 2020.
After working on projects for Classé and Bowers & Wilkins, Myers was hired by PS Audio, where he ended his tenure as senior analog design engineer. Myers recently joined Parasound (footnote 1) following the company's acquisition by David Sheriff.
Not all audio design engineers are themselves audiophiles, not even in the hi-fi space. But Myers…
I have been haunted for 15 years by these words: "Very often if I was given the choice of listening to a piece of music I really liked or listening to nothing at all, I would choose nothing at all. ... These days I don't listen to a lot of music, and I find a lot of pleasure in no music. There's a kind of silence and just hearing some conversation from outside, or hearing a police car in the distance, just these fragments of daily life are very poetic and very peaceful somehow."
They were spoken by Britisher David Toop (footnote 1), confirmed music-head, someone who has spent his life…
Ken Micallef wrote about the Mobile Fidelity SourcePoint 10 in June 2023 (Vol.46 No.6):
The SourcePoint 10 loudspeaker from MoFi Electronics (footnote 1) is an interesting, even unusual design. Sized somewhere between a conventional standmount and a small floorstander (but intended to be used on stands), the SourcePoint 10's beefy cabinet is similar in size to my 1978 Spendor BC1, but the SP10's 10" coaxial driver, which utilizes Andrew Jones's "Twin-Drive high-flux neodymium magnet system," is all new. The SP10 is heavy—at 46.2lb, nearly as heavy as the somewhat larger DeVore Fidelity O/…
Julie Mullins wrote about the Triangle Antal 40th in June 2023 (Vol.46 No.6):
My first opportunity to hear the Triangle Antal 40th Anniversary loudspeaker (footnote 1) was in the context of my December 2022 review of the HiFi Rose RA180 integrated amplifier. Because of that amplifier's unique feature set—specifically, its incorporation of four amplification modules—I wanted to try it with speakers that could be biamped. Robert Schryer favorably reviewed these Antals in the October 2022 issue, and his review convinced me that I wanted to hear them. "The Antal 40's sonic balance is akin to…
Photo by Harald Krichel
Before offering a few modest observations about the music, life, and times of David Lindley, a man who never met a stringed instrument he couldn't master and who died on March 3, I'll make two points, both somewhat contrarian.
In the flood of obituaries and tributes that have appeared since his death at age 78, one reads ad nauseam that Lindley, a lifelong Los Angeles resident whose most productive years were the 1970s and '80s, "help[ed] shape the sound of West Coast soft rock," as Guitar Player's writer put it. While Lindley's impact on Jackson Browne,…
There were several reasons why I was extremely eager to hear this system. First and foremost, given the high price of Wadax digital gear, I wanted to get a sense of what the Wadax Atlantis Reference DAC ($166,420), Wadax Atlantis Reference Server ($68,800), Wadax Atlantis Reference Transport $115,000), and Wadax Atlantis Reference PSU ($52,700) might sound like in the context of the MOC's challenging acoustics. Second, while I don't have good sense of the ultimate potential of Magico M6 loudspeakers ($185,000/pair), which I haven't heard as many times as I hope I will, I certainly know the…
How Raidho manages to produce such an extreme, seeming full range sound from a floorstander as diminutive as the X2t (14,000/pair) I do not know. But perhaps its planar-magnetic tweeter, which is almost the same as in the much larger TD6, has something to do with it. The speaker, which replaces the X2, also has contains 5.25" bass drivers with an extremely stiff tantalum-coated membrane, Nordost internal cabling, Mundorf capacitors, special decoupling feet that include metal balls, and 2.5-way construction. Crossover components have been improved, and are hard-wired point-to-point, and the…
Quite the well-conceived display, don't you think? I have to say the same about the sound, one of whose high points, on Gabriel Rios's "Swing Low," was a wonderfully large and captivating soundstage.
Grimm's new MU2 music streamer/DAC/analog preamplifier ($18,000; below), which will start shipping in October or November, is already back-ordered. The unit boasts the company's FPGA-based discrete Major D/A converter, a relay-based analog volume control, AES, S/PDIF, and optical digital inputs, and XLR and RCA analog inputs. Outputs are analog XLR and RCA, along with a headphone output. "All…