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A second way to appreciate the PARC EQ was to listen to music of great size and complexity, such as Mahler's Symphony 6 (Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Symphony 0001). I realized that, although there was no sapping of the orchestra's power and energy, there was a greatly enhanced facility to hear more of what was going on within the orchestra. PRaT (Pace, Rhythm and Timing) fans will appreciate what PARC does to delineate the pulse and meter of the music. I was motivated by this to dissect the effects of the various corrections, and again found that the audible…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Parametric Adaptive Room Compensation (PARC) 2-channel, 3-band parametric equalizer. Center frequencies: 16-350Hz. Q: 1-10. Attenuation: 0-18dB. Three nonvolatile memory stores. Power consumption: 50W. Voltages: 100, 120, 220, 240 (selectable).
Dimensions: 17" W by 4" H by 12.5" D. Weight: 20 lbs.
Serial number of unit reviewed: 103.0102.
Price: $2800. Approximate number of dealers: 10.
Manufacturer: Rives Audio, The ATI Group, Suite A-1, 8301 Patuxent Range Road, Jessup, MD 20794. Tel: (800) 959-6553. Fax: (707) 276-3983. Web: www.…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog source: Heybrook TT2 turntable, SME III tonearm, Ortofon SME30H cartridge, VPI SDS Line Controller.
Digital sources: Meridian Reference 800/861 DVD-Audio player, Sony XA-777ES SACD player, Mark Levinson No.360S D/A converter.
Preamplification: Sonic Frontiers Line-3 preamplifier, Audiolab 8000PPA phono stage.
Power amplifiers: Bel Canto eVo6, Sonic Frontiers Power-3, Classé CAM-350 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Revel Ultima Studio.
Cables: Interconnects: AudioQuest Anaconda & Python, both balanced; Cardas Cross, unbalanced. Speaker:…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Unusually, the Rives PARC has a hardwired bypass: when the unit is turned off, it passes the input signal to the output jacks. Turned on, the PARC had unity gain at 1kHz both when its Bypass LED was lit, and when the equalization was engaged but set to do nothing. It will not, therefore, mess up its owner's system-gain architecture. The PARC didn't invert signal polarity, and its input impedance was high 104k ohms unbalanced but a much lower 10.2k ohms balanced (both figures measured at 1kHz). The output impedance was a usefully low 25 ohms from the single-ended…
"My system has great imaging!" "I can hear sound coming from beyond my speakers." "The depth image in my system goes back at least 20 feet." Yes, we audiophiles are proud of our imaging (footnote 1), and we've worked hard to get it. My back is still aching from the last time I tweaked my speakers until the image was just right.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a test to set up and check a stereo system for correct imaging? Yes, Virginia, there is an imaging test—your LEDR is here (footnote 2). LEDR, which stands for "Listening Environment Diagnostic Recording," is available on a test CD…
Fixing problems
No loudspeaker/room system in my experience has even gotten a perfect grade on the very stringent LEDR test. Let's look at each path for problems and solutions.
No loudspeaker/room system in my experience has even gotten a perfect grade on the very stringent LEDR test. Let's look at each path for problems and solutions.
First, the Up path, which is incredibly revealing of room acoustics problems. Slight errors in the Up image (curving or bowing in) are permissible, representing differences in pinna shape from individual to individual. However, large anomalies in the Up path will affect a system's accuracy, even though height information is not purposely encoded into stereo recordings. If your system gets a bad grade on the Up…
Even poor people fly. You see them getting on and off planes with their NASCAR hats and their poor friends and their poor relatives waving to them at the gate. Flying is what everybody does nowadays, but it used to be just for the rich. It's hard to remember a time when the phrase jet set was charged with something other than irony.
Then again, even rich people have cheap, junky hi-fis—that, or no hi-fis at all. I've met some very well-to-do people and visited homes where the rarity and grandeur and sheer costliness of the furnishings have left me breathless—and the best "music system" I…
Here's a Maserati Spyder Corso (I live in Saratoga Springs, remember), total sticker price $100,150. This irrationally pretty thing is finished in vibrant blue with a rust-red leather interior, a color scheme not unlike that of the Eastern Bluebird. The heated interior is an $1100 option, and another $3000 or so of the final price is accounted for by the gas-guzzler tax this 11mpg beauty commands. I catch a glimpse through slotted wheels of brake calipers painted bright red, an option that alone adds more than $400 to the price.
Do I need this car? Of course I do.
Well, probably…
In 1975, I spent $45 bucks on a phono cartridge for my entry-level Thorens turntable. It was an Audio-Technica AT-something. It was purple, and it had a Shibata stylus profile, which impressed me. Using the financial model described above, something of similar quality should cost in the neighborhood of $117 today. But notwithstanding my Lollardy views, there aren't any $117 phono cartridges out there that would satisfy me. I've come to think of almost any phono cartridge that sells for less than $1000 as "affordable"—this from the owner of a rusty Saab with a Greenpeace sticker. God help me…
The title of this month's column is the legend Sheffield Labs emblazoned on a T-shirt a couple of years ago, to promote their jaundiced view of digital audio. Since then, even Sheffield's reactionary perfectionists softpedalled their anti-digital crusade, perhaps because of the number of CDs they've been selling! Their personnel no longer wear those T-shirts at CES, which is unfortunate. Although most people in the audio field no longer see digital audio as madness, digital denouncing is still very much with us.
I refer to the recently-announced discovery, by a Professor Judith Reilly,…