Hasil Adkins: Out to Hunch
Norton Records (no catalog # whatso-a-ever) LP, no CD. No producer, no engineer, no studio, no stereo, no mikes that weren't carbon police dispatcher models, no other people at all in fact—just Hasil Adkins, vocals and guitars and one-man drums and some weird rhythmic screeching that may or may not be LP surface noise. TT: infinite, as I can't stop hearing it in my head hours after I raised the needle off it.
To order, send $10 to Norton Records, Box 646, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10003. If you don't, you shall burn in hellfire eternal. Hasil Adkins Fan…
search
Charles Hansen said it best, in a recent e-mail: "People have been holding back from criticizing this technology because they weren't certain that some new discovery hadn't been made." Ayre Acoustics' main man was talking about "upsampling," whereby conventional "Red Book" CD data, sampled at 44.1kHz, are converted to a datastream with a higher sample rate. (Because of its association with DVD-Audio, 96kHz is often chosen as the new rate.)
I first heard this at HI-FI '98 in Los Angeles, where Steven Lee of Canorus, the then distributor of Nagra and dCS, was using a professional dCS 972…
Letters on upsampling were published in the March 2001 Stereophile:
Bob Katz on upsampling
Editor: In January of the first year of the third millennium, John Atkinson reviewed some new DVD-As that had been originally recorded at 44.1 or 48kHz and then upsampled to 88.2 or 96kHz, and stated that there would be no potential advantage to doing that. Actually, there is significant sonic advantage to remastering and reissuing entire catalogs that were originally recorded at 16-bit/44.1kHz.
Here's a summary of why even those recordings that do not contain high-frequency…
Of all the components to be seen and heard at an audio show or in a dealer's showroom, the most memorable and attention-grabbing are inevitably the super-speakers—bogglingly expensive, filled with cutting-edge engineering and exotic materials, of mammoth size and weight, with full-range reproduction that shakes building foundations and extends far enough up top to disrupt the navigation of bats. Survey the field, and the biggest Wilson, Aln, JMlab-Focal, Burmester, EgglestonWorks, and Nearfield Acoustics models, to name a few, fit that description.
In terms of its cost, complexity, and…
The other drivers are more or less conventional in type and application. The mid-woofer and front-panel dome tweeter are both sourced from ScanSpeak, the rear-mounted supertweeter from Visaton. The massive, vented 15" woofer cone is made of glass fiber reinforced with carbon fiber, and was developed in-house by Calix. A large outboard crossover is connected to the rear of the subwoofer cabinet via cables as thick as garden hoses, these terminated with professional-grade connectors. The crossover has two sets of WBT binding posts—biwiring is mandated. All of the internal cabling was designed…
To the extent that the Calix had a weakness, it is one endemic to speakers with large bass drivers in ported enclosures: to get the deepest, best-defined bass, it's necessary to drive such a speaker with an amplifier that can control that big woofer, and that will most often mean solid-state or hybrid power, especially if big orchestral music or rock is your meat. With the Classé CAM-350, Lamm M2.1, and Plinius SA-102 power amps, the PGS' bass was taut, tuneful, and deep; the exceptional bass capability and control of the Plinius was perhaps the best match, giving a profound, superbly…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: 5-way, 5-driver reflex-loaded loudspeaker system with separate subwoofer and crossover modules. Drive-units: ¾" rear-mounted, metal-dome supertweeter; horn-loaded, 1" silk-dome tweeter; horn-loaded, 2" fabric-dome midrange; 8" carbon-fiber-cone woofer; 15" Calix damped Kevlar-and-glass-fiber-cone subwoofer. Crossover frequencies: 60Hz, 700Hz, 2kHz, 15kHz (all 12dB/octave). Frequency response: 20Hz-40kHz, ±3dB. Sensitivity: 88dB/W/m. Nominal impedance: 6 ohms. Recommended power: 100-1000W.
Dimensions: 62" H by 23" W by 39" D (plus 6" D for…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analogue sources: SOTA Cosmos & Cosmos Series III, Clearaudio Champion 2 turntables; Graham 2.2, Clearaudio Unify tonearms; Dynavector XV-1 & XV-1S, Benz L2 cartridges.
Digital sources: Classé Omega SACD/CD player, Ayre D-1x DVD-V/CD player, Esoteric DV-50 universal SACD/DVD-A player.
Preamplification: Manley Labs Steelhead, Boulder 2008, Aesthetix Io Signature phono stages; Mark Levinson No.32 Reference, Jeff Rowland Design Group Synergy IIi, Ayre K-1x line stages.
Power amplifiers: Lamm M2.1, Classé CAM-350, Manley 250 Neo-Classic…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
The phone call from the shipping company was the harbinger of much sweaty work on my part: "Sorry, the local trucking company can't deliver the Calix speakers today. The four crates weight 1300 lbs and they don't have a forklift available." Neither did I! But once a forklift had been found and the crates stowed in my garage, I was impressed by the way the Phoenix's packaging had been designed for easy handling—always an issue with speakers this complex and this massive.
For obvious reasons, it wasn't possible to raise the Calix Phoenix Grand Signature off…
I've been wondering whether we who write about audio will ever agree on a sensible way to express the scale of the differences we hear. If magazines like Stereophile and The Abso!ute Sound lack credibility among the broader audience of music lovers and hi-fi shoppers—and we do—one important reason may be our habit of greatly exaggerating the importance of differences that in fact are very small. A subtle improvement, one that most people wouldn't notice except in a carefully arranged comparison, is often described by audiophile reviewers in language that makes it seem like the contrast…