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Attempting to use the absolute sound—love that phrase!—as a reference, you may think that you can make value judgments about a hi-fi component because you already know what a classical recording should sound like—the real thing. In actuality, as the recording doesn't have that potential, you need first to assess its quality by listening to it through components that you need already to know the sound of when compared with the sound of live music. You need knowledge of the chicken before you can assess the quality of the egg, but you only have access to the quality of the chicken if first you…
Similarly, I use Wilson, Reference, Water Lily Acoustics, and Sheffield Lab classical recordings to assess departures from tonal neutrality, pink noise to look for the presence of resonant problems, pretty much any modern rock album to assess the ability of amplifiers and speakers to present tight, well-defined midbass, good organ recordings and sinewave sweeps to investigate low-frequency extension, drum and percussion recordings to investigate "jump factor" and overall dynamics, in fact any recording where I can break the logical judgmental loop due to the fact that I have independent…
Letters on this subject appeared in April 1989, Vol.12 No.4
Mellow out!
Editor: I am highly annoyed with certain elitist snobs among your readers whose attitude toward rock & roll can only be described as ugly. Some have likened listening to rock through Apogees to hauling lumber with a BMW, and claim only classical music is appropriate for their high-end equipment. This attitude seems to begin with the reasonable idea that audio equipment is best judged by its ability to reproduce acoustical instruments. There then follows a mystical leap to insisting that classical music is…
As We See It: The Last Word on Fidelity
STEREOPHILE May 1989, Vol.12 No.5
J. Gordon Holt
STEREOPHILE May 1989, Vol.12 No.5
J. Gordon Holt
Last October, in Vol.11 No.10, Stereophile's Founder and Chief Tester J. Gordon Holt stated, in his acerbic editorial "The Acoustical Standard," that, in his opinion, only recordings for which there is an original acoustic reference—ie, typically those of classical music—should be used to evaluate hi-fi components. And that in the absence of a consensus over such a policy, high-end component manufacturers were losing their way over what does and does not represent good sound quality.
…
Letters in response appeared in July 1989, Vol.12 No.7
Again, the Acoustical Standard
Editor: Perusing the April issue's schedule of High End Hi-Fi show events (p.77), I noticed the variety of "live-music" recitals on the agenda. I also noticed that none of them featured amplified instruments, which is, of course, as it should be.
But...if acoustical instruments are really what Stereophile sees as the sounds we should be striving to reproduce, how can John Atkinson continue to defend his view that rock material is suitable for evaluating the quality of reproduced sound?
—…
Giuseppe Verdi gave the world more than two dozen operas, some good sacred music, and one string quartet. He also provided the young Arturo Toscanini with one of his first big breaks—conducting the singing of "Va pensiero" at his burial procession—and gave the flagship consumer product from England's dCS Ltd. its name. That the latter two gestures were posthumous and unwitting does nothing to diminish their poetry.
The dCS Verdi is a grandly expensive ($14,995) CD/SACD transport, introduced in 2001 and intended for use in the world's finest domestic replay systems. (dCS also…
But does upsampling sound better simply because it makes it easy for the best (digital) filters to do their job? Does it work, as some have suggested (footnote 1), because the comparatively shallow filtering that's part of the package leaves in the information stream some high-frequency artifacts that consequently act as another round of dither? Or is it something else?
I don't know. Neither do the good people at dCS—although they say they're working hard to find out.
Fun later
The two products at hand comprise a sort of economy version of the full-monty dCS front-end. I…
But you must bear in mind one unsmall matter: All that goodness depended on a number of things, some of which may confound your expectations:
• Without the slightest doubt, the combination worked better at playing music when the Delius was in Master mode—overriding, as it were, the word clock in the datastream and that produced by the Verdi La Scala. The former didn't so much sound different (although imaging junkies may not agree, given their heightened sensitivity to such things as stage dimensions) as simply allow me to relax and be fooled into thinking I was hearing strings of notes…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Verdi La Scala: Conjoined-twin-box CD/SACD transport. Formats supported: CD, CD-R, CD-RW, SACD. DSD & upsampled "Red Book" output jacks: IEEE1394. "Red Book" and downsampled DSD output jacks: XLR, RCA, BNC, TosLink. Word-clock input & output jacks: BNC.
Dimensions: 18.15" W by 5.4" H by 16.2" D. Weight: 37.4 lbs.
Serial number of unit reviewed: VLS098152.
Price: $14,995.
Delius: Single-box, two-channel digital-to-analog converter. Formats supported: multi-bit LPCM at 32, 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192kHz sampling rates; single-bit DSD at 2…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog sources: Linn LP12 turntable with Naim Armageddon power supply, Naim Aro tonearm; Rega Planar 9 turntable; Supex 900 Super, Linn Akiva, Lyra Helikon Mono cartridges; Audio Note AN-S2 step-up transformer.
Digital source: Sony SCD-777ES SACD/CD player.
Preamplifiers: Fi, DNM 3C Primus.
Power amplifiers: EAR 890, Lamm ML2.1 monoblocks, First Watt F1.
Loudspeakers: Quad ESL-989, Lowther PM2A in modified Medallion horns.
Cables: Digital: various dCS. Interconnect: Audio Note AN-Vx, Nordost Valhalla, homemades. Speaker: Audio Note AN-SPx,…