I've never lived in New York City, but I've visited often, especially the Upper West Side, where my wife's grandparents lived for many years. There's a little jazz bar there, on Broadway near 106th Street, aka Duke Ellington Boulevard.
Augie's Jazz Bar, as it was called until its demise late in the last century, is apparently famous. Smoke, a movie starring Harvey Keitel, with a screenplay by the prolific and serious novelist Paul Auster, is rumored to be based on the life of the bar's original owner.
Augie's was a special place, with a sort of authenticity that is all too rare…
Our Delta L-1011 emerged from the cloud split-seconds before its wheels touched the waterlogged ground. "How much lower does the cloud cover have to be before they divert us to another city?" I asked Tom Norton. "About an inch," came the phlegmatic reply. (Ex-F4 pilot TJN categorizes any landing you can walk away from as "good.") But at least we had reached Atlanta, after a saga of air-traffic control problems, weather delays, and missed connections. (Does anyone remember taking a flight that wasn't full, wasn't late, and wasn't sweaty and stressful? Wasn't deregulation supposed to improve…
While necessary, I consider helping its members in their dealings with the monolithic CES organization and in more successfully lobbying Congress to their benefit to be subsidiary functions for AAHEA. For me, creating a necessarily higher public profile for the High End is the single most important goal, and one in which AAHEA's Awards play a major role. For the 1991 Awards, AAHEA requested 14 high-end writers to act as nominating judges. These judges—responsible, in the words of AAHEA's Executive Committee, "for nominating products, individuals, or companies who have made exceptional…
I first met Jacques Mahul (the JM in JMlab/Focal) when my wife Kathleen and I traveled to Paris to cover HiFi (Hee-Fee) '96. The sound produced by the JMlab Grand Utopias—on a collection of many-chassis'd YBA electronics—got my enthusiastic vote for best of show (footnote 1). JMlab's large demo room was always packed to the rafters with avid listeners. (As a group, melomanes, as audiophiles are called in France, exactly mirror their stateside brethren in appearance and general demeanor. Yes, they're a raucous and demanding bunch!) As I gleefully accepted a bottle of JMlab Sauternes from…
Two 6" midrange drivers frame Focal's TELAR 57 inverted-dome tweeter in a D'Appolito configuration. Literature: "To obtain the best possible lateral dispersion while still approaching the principle of the 'point source,' Focal/JMlab has worked especially hard on the upper-midrange enclosure, opting for a horizontally receding form worked in three solid pieces of tauri. While this elegant frontage calls for a sterling effort from the cabinetmaker, it eliminates undesirable edge effects without resorting to artifices such as sticking felt around the loudspeakers—a trick unworthy of a truly…
The cross between the tweeter and the two midrange drivers was seamless and in no way boxy or discontinuous. The entire midrange was open, fast, startling, and immediate, always superbly natural and beautifully integrated with the highs. In fact, the midrange was everything one might imagine a quintessential French product might be: lustrous and deep, with shading and bloom. The integration of the lower midrange with the upper bass was also very clean, transparent, and unruffled. And talk about power...sheesh. First off, understand, this is a bass-reflex design: the slot runs along the…
I ruminated on the Utopia's effortless musicality while listening to Haydn piano trios by the Beaux Arts Trio (Philips 9500 657, LP). It was fitting music for a late-October afternoon: the leaves were turning rust as the radiators gurgled away—not always quietly—in our loft. The magnificent re-creation of the piano's full power response throughout the entire audio band was thrilling. Notes: "Piano sound at the very top of what I've heard. Once again, with the Nagra, I feel like I'm sitting on the stage in a folding chair, lost in thought as the trio plays before me. How much better does it…
Sidebar 1: Specifications Description: Three-way floorstanding, reflex-loaded loudspeaker. Drive-units: one 1¼" inverted-dome titanium tweeter, two 6½" sandwich-technology midrange drivers, one 12" sandwich bass-reflex woofer. Crossover points: 400Hz and 2.5kHz at 18dB/octave. Frequency response: 26Hz-25kHz -3dB. Impedance: 4 ohms nominal, 3.3 ohms minimum. Sensitivity: 94.5dB.
Dimensions: 53" H by 17" W by 24" D. Weight: 275 lbs each.
Serial numbers of units reviewed: 1997 Vintage 7170001.
Price: $29,500/pair. Approximate number of dealers: 30.
Manufacturer: JMlab/Focal SA,…
Sidebar 2: Measurements The Utopia goes very loud with only a few amplifier watts. I calculated its B-weighted sensitivity as 92.5dB/2.83V/m, which is very high—around 6dB higher than the industry average. It does demand some current from the amplifier, however, the impedance (fig.1) remaining between 3 ohms and 6 ohms over much of the audio band. And although the electrical phase angle (dashed trace) remains low in the midrange and treble, in the bass the speaker gets highly capacitive while the magnitude is still low. At 60Hz, for example, the Utopia combines 4 ohms with a -50 degrees…
Note, however, the peak at 1100Hz in this graph. This may not be the right shape to make the speaker sound a little nasal; if associated with a resonance, however, it might at worst add some upper-midrange aggressiveness to the Utopia's balance, or at best reinforce the speaker's presentation of recorded detail. To make sure that this was not a one-off sample problem, we unpacked the second speaker of the pair and, cursing its 275-lb weight, I performed an identical set of measurements. The second speaker measured identically—a tribute to JMlab's quality assurance, and confirmation that the…
