What the Hovland did well—almost everything—served every kind of music equally. I pulled out stuff like Neil Young's…
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And the Hovland could rock. Its speed, transparency, bass control, and treble extension delivered electric music with satisfying realism: plenty of bite to cymbal splashes, lots of punch to electric bass. It wasn't at all polite, plummy, overripe, or soft, though the liquidity sometimes gave the sound a bit too much "finesse." Still, I never felt my fingers wandering toward the acoustic, jazz, or classical shelves because that's what sounded better through the HP-100.
Noise might be an issue for some potential phono-stage purchasers. The MC stage had an underlying hum I couldn't get rid of, and while it was inaudible under normal listening circumstances, I was bothered that it was there at all. The HP-100 is not the quietest preamp you can buy, nor did it deliver the blackest backgrounds, but it was quiet enough, and the space below the music had an unusually supple, natural quality. (I've also been using the non-Multiwave version of PS Audio's P300 Power Plant AC conditioner. While it made a definite improvement to the Ayre K-1x, for some reason it added…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Vacuum-tube full-function preamplifier with built-in phono stage and optional MC step-up transformer module. Line-stage tube complement: two 12AX7s, one 12AT7. Phono stage tube complement: two 12AX7s, one 12AU7.
Line-stage: Voltage gain: 14dB. Frequency response: 10Hz-25kHz, +0/-0.25dB. S/N Ratio: 80dB (wideband) ref. 3V out, (with level control fully clockwise). THD: ±1% at rated output. Output impedance: approximately 2500 ohms. Input impedance: 100k ohms.
MC phono stage: Voltage gain: 66dB at 1kHz. Frequency response: 25Hz-25kHz, ±0.15dB…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog sources: Simon Yorke turntable, Graham 2.0 and Immedia RPM2 tonearms, Lyra Helikon, Parnassus D.C.t, Kondo 10-J, and van del Hul Black Beauty Colibri cartridges.
Digital sources: Musical Fidelity X-Ray CD player, Marantz DR17 HDCD recorder, EAD DSP-9000 Mk.3 D/A processor.
Preamplification: Audio Research Reference phono stage; Lyra Arion, Audio Note AN S6 CZ step-up transformers; Ayre K-1x preamplifier.
Power amplifier: Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 300.
Loudspeakers: Sonus Faber Amati Homage, ProAc Future 1.
Cables: Hovland Music Groove…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
The drop-dead gorgeous Hovland HP-100 preamp offered a maximum line-stage gain of 13.6dB—the silky-feeling switched attenuator operating in accurate 2dB steps down to -58dB, with then a step to a full mute. (There's also a separate Mute button.) The volume control didn't have an exact unity-gain setting; the nearest was the 3 o'clock position, which featured a 0.135dB insertion loss. The 12 o'clock position was equivalent to -14dB referred to the "unity gain" setting.
The Hovland's line stage didn't invert absolute polarity. Its input impedance was a…
This graph was taken into the kind 100k ohms load. Reducing the load to 10k ohms, a typical input impedance for many solid-state power amplifiers (fig.5), increased the second harmonic almost tenfold, to -60dB (0.1%), and added some third harmonic. Dropping the load to the admittedly punishing 600 ohms raised the second harmonic to -44dB (0.6%, not shown). It is probably inadvisable to use the Hovland with those few power amplifiers that have input impedances below 10k ohms.
Fig.5 Hovland HP-100, line-stage spectrum of 50Hz sinewave, DC-1kHz, at 2V into 10k ohms (linear frequency…
Michael Fremer wrote again about the HP-100 in March 2002 (Vol.25 No.3)
In my drool-drenched review of the HP-100 in the November 2000 Stereophile, I complained about an almost-inaudible hum in the phono section. After I'd bought my review sample, Hovland made a production change in the moving-coil transformer, so I sent my unit back to be upgraded. You might think they'd have taken the opportunity to fix the hum, but they just changed the transformer and sent my HP-100 back still humming.
After the Home Entertainment 2001 show last May, Hovland's Alex Crespi came back to my…
I have been reading a lot of late. Whether it is due to the reduced appeal of recorded music owing to the ever-decreasing shelves of LPs in our local specialty record store (the owner explains that he still wants to sell LPs; it's the record companies that make it increasingly harder for him to do so with punitive returns policies and deaf ears to back orders), or the fact that it's Spring, I don't know. But the fact remains that I have recently found myself devouring a shelf-full of titles sometimes only vaguely related—horrors!—to high fidelity. Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words, for…
If you think that my selection has been biased in favor of the subjectivist viewpoint, and that Heyser must himself have been a crazed "golden ears," neither is the case. If you were an admirer, as I was, of Richard Heyser's loudspeaker reviews in Audio (a full index of them is included in TDS), you will remember that he was one of the few reviewers who attempted a complete technical analysis of the product under test. Read again two of his last reports, on the Quad ELS-63 (the latest version of which is put through its paces by Sam Tellig and myself in this issue) and the Thiel CS3, in the…
The sound has a "where," which already covers three dimensions. It has a "tone," which includes pitch and timbre, themselves independent variables. Its intensity, a "how much?" that varies with time, represents its dynamics. It has a "when" aspect. The listener's instantaneous perception of musical values depends very much on what has gone before. And which of these aspects is the most important when assessing quality will be different for each listener.
And is "objectivity" even the right tool to assess worth in an area which uses technology in the service of art? You can't measure the…