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The Fifth Element #41 2.5-Star Lists of Recordings

2.5 STARS

List No.9:

Eugene Fedushenko, Baltimore, MD

Dear John, Without a doubt, you will receive plethora of e-letters; thus, to save your time, my list below is devoid of any protracted comments. I'll be happy, however, to write few lines (why each recording was chosen), if you like. Here's my, very subjective, list.

1. Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Andre Previn cond.
Bitter-sweet music; great performance; a classic.

2. Take 6: Take 6, Reprise, 1988
Best vocal band in the whole universe.

3. Sarah Vaughan with…

The Fifth Element #41 Special Walter Pater Memorial "Burn With a Jet-Like Flame" Award

Special Walter Pater Memorial "Burn With a Jet-Like Flame" Award
List No.12:

Ron Ramsey, Eugene, OR
America: The Prequel
"We will shoot some arrows into the white man. If he truly has medicine, he will not be hurt. If he has no medicine, he will be dead."—Wind In His Hair

1. Johnny Preston: "Running Bear"
"Now they'll always be together, In the Happy Hunting Ground."

In 1989, I was in Montreux, Switzerland, attending the jazz festival. The concierge at my hotel was a young woman, Native Parisian, spoke five languages. Because of her language skills…

Listening #52

"Men must eat, though angels be their guests."
—William Laird, "Träumerei at Ostendorff's"

A few months ago, when an audio newcomer asked what I use for a music source at home, my first, casual answer fell short. When I responded by saying "a Linn"—which to me is the same thing as saying "a small Scottish record player"—my young friend was no less in the dark. I hadn't considered that, to an audiophile who came of age after the 1980s, "a Linn" could mean just about anything, ranging from a music server to an in-wall loudspeaker.

At least one precedent comes to mind:…

Listening #52 Page 2

The high-tension line, which has dark stripes on a silvery yellow background—the yellow may have been from age, of course—was shorter. I desoldered one end from the point on the tag board where it connected to resistors R2, R3, R5, and R6 (footnote 1), and clipped the other end from terminal 3 of the Jones plug. All that remained was to desolder the input signal wire from terminal 2 of the input socket—I left the other end connected to the control grid of input tube no.1—and Mr. Jones was made redundant.

Now came the hard part: fashioning a mounting plate for a newfangled phono socket.…

Upward Mobility: From 2 Channels to Surround

When the brief flowering of quadraphonics began in the early 1970s, I was still at school. As a nascent but impecunious audiophile, I therefore had a ringside seat at the audio industry's first attempt to go multichannel—and, even for the disinterested onlooker, it wasn't a pretty spectacle.

The first problem was that the technology just wasn't ready: the QS and SQ matrix systems worked by combining the four source channels into the two available from LP, whence they could never be independently recovered, while JVC's ambitious CD4 discrete system multiplexed two channels into…

Upward Mobility: From 2 Channels to Surround Page 2

A block diagram of the Trifield circuit is shown in fig.1. First, the left and right channels are passed through an MS matrix to convert them into sum (M) and difference (S) signals. In the Bell-Klipsch scheme, the M component was fed directly to the center speaker, with appropriate gain correction, whereas here it is first divided into two overlapping frequency ranges by complementary low-pass and high-pass filters, their corner frequencies set at 5kHz or above. (Gerzon's listening tests showed that the exact corner frequency and the filters' rate of rolloff were uncritical, although the…

Sumo Polaris II power amplifier

What's in a name? Quite a bit, when you stop and think about it. Would you rather have prostate surgery by Dr. Steadyhand or Dr. Whoops? Names imply a lot, even if we don't consciously make the connection; that's why your Polo shirt was made by Ralph Lauren instead of Ralph Lipshitz.

Which brings us to the amp in question: the Sumo! Now, what picture pops into your head at the word "Sumo"? For me, it's two words: BUTT CHEEKS. I see huge, rolling, shuddering butt cheeks spilling out of black cotton Pampers while two Japanese Michelin Men alternately hug and gut-slam each other out of the…

Sumo Polaris II power amplifier Page 2

The first time I went to London, I was called on more than one occasion by the pale and lovely English women "cheeky." I thought they were referring to my actual cheeks, which, like a chipmunk's, were filled with enough American pizza, chicken-fried steaks, and Chinese food to last me the week I was there. A British friend explained that "cheeky" meant forward and aggressive; exactly what I heard from the Sumo's midrange. The Polaris's presentation here is somewhat of a rollercoaster, with a peak in the lower midrange followed by a dip in the upper mids. This deviation in the range where…

Sumo Polaris II power amplifier Postscript: Turning the Other Cheek

Postscript: Turning the Other Cheek

After I sent the Sumo off to Santa Fe for measurements, I got a good news/bad news call from JA: "The Polaris you listened to was not only a pre-production sample, but defective as well (footnote 1). Its distortion on one channel was much higher than spec, and one of the TL-circuit trimpots had a bad wiper. A production sample is being Fed-Exed to you as we speak; could you give it a listen and write a followup by Monday?"

The good news? "I saw an Elvis movie on TV the other night!"

I also received a fax from Sumo's Mike Custer, who…

Sumo Polaris II power amplifier Measurements

Sidebar 1: Measurements

All the measurements were made after each amplifier had been preconditioned by running it at one-third full power into 8 ohms for an hour. This thermally stresses the amp to the maximum, though the Polaris didn't overheat. The Sumo's small-signal frequency response (fig.1) showed no surprises; neither did the shape of a 10kHz squarewave (fig.2). Both indicated a flat response, which is as it should be for a power amplifier. The input impedance at 1kHz was a reasonable 45k ohms while the signal polarity was the same as the other three amplifiers tested (Muse Model…