Well, last week was spent shipping the November 2010 issue to press, and this week has been spent shipping the 2011 Buyer’s Guide to pre-press. At the same time, we’re pumping out copy for the December 2010 issue, getting some layouts done, and trying not to mix things up too much. You wouldn’t want the technical specifications for 1500 loudspeakers popping up in the middle of Art Dudley’s “Listening” column, would you? That just wouldn’t be right at all. And the week started with a whirlwind trip to the Princeton Record Exchange, where…
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I noticed this sign hanging above the entrance to the Marriott Tech Center, home of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. “Save the Music”—a fine message, but sort of vague. What's it about? I wondered. Inside the hotel, near the elevators, I found a postcard with a picture of a pianist at a piano, both the musician and his instrument covered in what appeared to be thick black oil. (Oh no!) At the top of the postcard again were the words, “Save the Music.”
On the back of the postcard, I found a message from dCS, titled, “Saving the Music for 25 Years.” Audiophiles are familiar with dCS—we know…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Five-in-one component with class-D amplifier, preamplifier, streamer, DAC, and CD player. 5.5" LCD touchscreen, onboard parametric EQ, virtual VU meters, dedicated Eversolo Control app. Output power: 60Wpc into 8 ohms (17.8dBW), 110Wpc into 4 ohms (17.4dBW). THD, 20Hz–20kHz, 5W at 1kHz: <0.0037%. S/N ratio: &62;109dB. Frequency response 20Hz–20kHz ±0.25dB, 20Hz– 40kHz –3dB. Crosstalk: –108dB. AK4493SEQ DAC chip supports stereo up to DSD512, PCM 32/768. Supported file formats include WAV, FLAC, AIF, AIFF, AAC, NRG, APE, and CUE.
Dimensions…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital sources: Aurender A20 streamer and DAC, Grimm MU1, Evernote DMP-A10, Sony S9000ES SACD player, 15" MacBook Air running Roon 2.0. Roon ROCK (Lenovo ThinkCentre).
Preamplifiers: Benchmark HPA4, Quad 33 (2024).
Power amplifiers: McIntosh MC462, Quad 303 monoblocks (2024), WiiM Amp Ultra.
Integrated amplifiers: HiFi Rose RS520, Audia Flight FLS10 PrimaLuna EVO 400.
Loudspeakers: Monitor Audio Gold 100 6G, Vanatoo Transparent One Encore.
Cables: Speaker, AudioQuest Thunderbird Zero. Power cables and interconnects, AudioQuest High-…
Back in April, Daniel Jacques of Audio Plus, Focal's North American distributor, invited me to visit Focal's factory in St. Etienne. Since I'd never reviewed any Focal loudspeakers, I didn't know a lot about the company, but I have spent many happy hours in Jonathan Scull's ribbon chair, listening to his Grand Utopias, so I was eager to go—and to learn more.
Focal, formerly JMlabs, was founded by Jacques Mahul in 1980. Mahul had been an engineer at Audax and an audio journalist at L'Audiophile. Mahul had chafed at Audax's concentration on low-end drivers, so he founded Focal and JMlabs to…
Like many vinyl obsessives, I've amassed a considerable CD collection—a 10' × 15' wall of them, behind dark blue curtains in my listening room. It is almost as if I was concealing a dirty secret from purist analog snobs, including me.
Between 1990 and 2010, CDs ruled. Some titles released during that era were never released on vinyl. Peek behind those curtains and you'll find a mix of such music—music released only on CD: Dim Lights, Thick Smoke & Hillbilly Music. Country and Western Hit Parade 1959. Paul Motian's six-disc, self-titled ECM epic. Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, a Tom…
The NuPrime brand may not be familiar to many readers of Stereophile, though a quick search reveals coverage in a 10-year-old report, a side reference in a 2022 review of a different product, and most recently, a brief mention of the product I'm reviewing—the NuPrime MCX-800AD—at High End Munich 2025. In the early years of this century, Stereophile reviewed several NuForce products as well; Jason Lim founded NuPrime after NuForce was sold.
NuPrime calls the MCX-800AD ($3995) an "Immersive Audio Processor," but that's not really what it is, so I don't know why they call it that. NuPrime…
Sidebar 4: Measurements
I used my Audio Precision SYS2722 system to measure the NuPrime MCX-800AD. Although the amplifier has eight channels, my Audio Precision is a strictly two-channel device, so I measured the analog inputs and loudspeaker outputs for channels 7 and 8, which were closest to the analyzer with the amplifier on the test bench. As the NuPrime has a class-D output stage and class-D amplifiers emit relatively high levels of ultrasonic noise that would drive my analyzer's input into slew-rate limiting, I inserted an Audio Precision AUX-0025 passive low-pass filter between the…
Sidebar 4: More Measurements
For digital-input testing, I used optical S/PDIF data, USB data sourced from my MacBook Pro, and network data played with Roon. Apple's AudioMIDI utility revealed that the USB port accepted 32-bit integer data sampled at all rates from 44.1kHz to 768kHz. The USB Prober app identified the Symphonia as "Symphonia" from "T+A elektroakustik" with the serial number "343636303133510D00320039," and indicated that the USB port operated in the optimal isochronous asynchronous mode. The optical and coaxial inputs only accepted data sampled at rates up to 96kHz—there was…
There's widespread consensus that Shohei Ohtani's performance in Game 4 of the 2025 National League Championship Series was the greatest in baseball history: at the plate, 3 for 3 with three home runs; on the mound, six innings with 10 strikeouts and only 2 hits allowed. That defines double threat.
Almost seven decades earlier, jazz's original triple threat made his first record—Triple Threat—for the King label: Roland Kirk, just a month past his 21st birthday and blind since infancy, played three different horns, sometimes simultaneously and not as a mere novelty. Later he added flute,…