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Bill Voss first sold a Technics turntable in 1975, as a high school student working part-time at the Audio Den in New Haven, Connecticut. He retired in June 2026 after 44 years with parent company Panasonic, the past decade as US Business Development Manager during Technics's successful relaunch as a hi-fi major player.

While at Panasonic, Voss was involved in sales, marketing, and education as the company brought new technologies to market. He took part in Panasonic and Technics product launches for the Compact Disc, HDTV, plasma TV, digital still cameras, DVD, DAT, Digital…

Analog sources: J.Sikora Aspire turntable, VPI Goldy MC cartridge.
Digital sources: Tascam CD-200iL CD player, HoloAudio May DAC.
Preamplifiers: Manley Chinook (phono).
Loudspeakers: DeVore Fidelity Super Nine, Voxativ Ampeggio 2024.
Cables: Interconnects: AudioQuest Pegasus and Black Beauty, Triode Wire Labs Spirit II (RCA), "Spirit 75" S/PDIF (RCA/BNC). Speaker: AudioQuest William Tell Zero (10').
Accessories: Pro-Ject VC-S2 ALU, HumminGuru record cleaning machines; AOCISKA soft bristle brush; AudioQuest PQ-707 and IsoTek EVO3 Aquarius…

In audio as in life, there are moments when you find your people and, if you're lucky, discover something about yourself. For me, one of these happy junctures took place in the mid-1990s when I came across an issue of Sound Practices.

At the time I was a 20-something nerd haunting New York's audio stores for discounts and enviously reading the equipment reviews in Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. I made sure to keep this activity from my friends, many of whom collected punk and indie rock records…

But people who study Johnson's brief career have noted how his guitar-playing skills took a giant leap forward after he wrote the song in the early 1930s.

This type of Faustian contract came to mind as I was digging into the mind-…

When was the last time I'd encountered a Plinius product? I found no talk of the 40-year-old New Zealand brand between a brief mention in a 2015 column by John Marks and 2022, when Robert Schryer spied a Plinius component at the Montréal Audio Fest. The most recent Stereophile review of a Plinius component was Erick Lichte's 2011 take on the SA-103…

Great disc jockeys become like old friends. Jim Wilke's nationally syndicated public radio program "Jazz After Hours" began in 1984 and ran for 30 years. But long before Wilke's mellifluous, intelligent voice became reassuringly familiar to jazz fans across the United States and beyond, he worked for KING-FM in Seattle. In 1962, three years out of college…

In 2003, my first-generation Indian-immigrant mom got her first new car in America, a beige-gold Honda Odyssey. I was eight years old. Adhi, my younger brother, was two. Our favorite pastime became shoving a CD into the slot of the finicky car stereo and listening to the same 15 Tamil-language songs on repeat until they imprinted on our brains.

In childhood and through college, music—Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Imagine Dragons,…

Joe Jackson, the veteran British pianist/vocalist, insists on a certain level of sound quality, which can be traced all the way back to his 1979 A&M debut album, Look Sharp! His five-decade-long career has covered a vast repertoire, and along the way, he's stuck in a few allusions to previous work. When you cue up "Fabulous People," the last track on side 1 of his excellent, biting, playful new LP Hope and Fury (earMUSIC), and listen to the intro, you zero in on the ting-tinging of the glockenspiel. You think, "Haven't I heard that before?"

Yes, you have…

Description: Solid state, class-A/AB stereo/bridged mono power amplifier. Inputs: 1 pair single-ended (RCA), 1 pair balanced (XLR). Outputs: 2 pair loudspeaker binding posts. Rated output power, stereo: 150Wpc continuous into 8 ohms (21.8dBW), 250Wpc into 4 ohms (21dBW). Rated output power, mono: 450W continuous into 8 ohms (26.5dBW), 600W into 4 ohms (24.8dBW). Frequency response: 20Hz–20kHz, ±0.5dB, –3dB at 70kHz. Distortion: <0.03% THD at rated output power. Output current: 50A per channel for short durations, fuse protected. Input impedance: 47k ohms. Hum…